Assistive Intelligence comes in many forms. But, the one that we are most used to is chat GPT, and its conversational interface.
There are also specific chat-type AI tools that specialise in achieving particular tasks, such as those that are very effective at asking and answering questions in a useful and pragmatic way.
The majority of these tools generally don’t have what is known in the world of technology as a permanent state. When you go and talk to ChatGPT, it always starts with a fresh dialogue box. Many assistants are built like this by default. And yes, you can go to the history and continue a chat, but the chat tool doesn’t always have the awareness of previous conversations and who you are.
An agentic workflow is one where the Assistive Intelligence tools you’re using have what might be described as a memory or an active state. In addition to this memory, this agents can’t self organise to execute tasks without significant prompting from the user. To some extent, imagine having an agent that, what we in Just Tools call an ‘agent mob,’ helps you write reports.
In this Agentic workflow, the writer agent you might experience as a chatbot is, in the background, composed of several roles: a researcher, a reviewer, a data analyst, a data visualiser, an editor, a quality controller, and an agent who verifies that the data is correct and can be validated, among other functions. In this workflow, what might be experienced by the user as a chat interface, will be a series of agents that have been integrated to communicate with each other, and to collectively solve problems.
The main benefit of this approach is that by giving specific agents constraints on their focus and specialisation, and having them concentrate on particular tasks, you can effectively specialise them. Just like in any operating model, where it makes sense to specialize certain tasks and train people on specific components, creating agentic workflows provides the opportunity to achieve this specialization. Agentic workflows will effectively be Assistive Intelligence tools provided to your teams. It will be composed of an AI mob that has awareness memory structure, and helps your team be faster and produce better quality outcomes.
