What are Agentic AI Flows?

Agentic AI can be used to create autonomous systems that perform tasks, make decisions and interact with their environments, focused on achieving goals and adapting to changes. It can do this on its own, or with human interaction at key stages.

By incorporating these features into digital platforms, businesses can create user experiences that save time, allowing users to focus on the valuable outcomes of otherwise often repetitive tasks.

How do Agentic Flows work?

An Agentic AI flow controls AI agents, each capable of carrying out a task based on its instruction and context. This could be a single agent, or thousands, all equipped with tools to interact with large language models (LLMs) and external systems like search engines, file systems, web scraping tools and APIs.

Agentic flows can be triggered by user interactions, such as conversations or search queries, or through other automated processes. Using the capabilities of LLMs, an agentic feature can be built to understand the intent and context of a query, and use that information to carry out complex actions by selecting the appropriate tools and generating the necessary commands to use these tools. The main flow can interrupt itself, and return to the user for further input and clarification, adjusting the agents' goals accordingly. For instance, an agentic feature might assist a user in planning and booking a business trip, or help an account manager create a weekly report for a client. The possibilities are almost endless.

How can I use Agentic Flows in my digital platform?
  • Automation of everyday repetitive tasks
  • Surfacing related and relevant content and data from multiple internal and external sources, based on semantic understanding of users’ intent within a user journey.
  • Data manipulation and exploration
  • Extending user journeys outside of your application ecosystem
  • Building auto-suggested reporting dashboards
  • Creating semi-autonomous assistants - e.g. a research assistant, PA, travel agent, customer onboarding assistant or sales co-pilot
Gaining users' trust

While today's LLMs are powerful, they can still make mistakes, and users are understandably cautious. When implementing agentic flows that are initiated within a UI-based user journey, we recommend an augmentation approach where users can choose to use AI tools alongside their usual workflow. In these situations, the best results come from showing users a preview of the AI-enhanced outcome, instead of automatically applying it to search results or inserting it into a creation process. We also advocate transparency in exposing / logging the detail of the actions and information that take place during an active flow.

Designing for failure within flows

There are several reasons why an activity in a flow might fail, such as timeouts, access issues with external tools, the LLM selecting incorrect API parameters, or large content responses overwhelming the LLM's context window. Systems utilising agentic flows should be designed to handle these issues by incorporating vector-based search, effective response parsing, and robust state management within an asynchronous workflow engine to facilitate recovery from failures.

What are the risks, and how can they be avoided?
  • Governance of sensitive data: anonymisation, self-hosted models and guardrails
  • Hallucination: reinforced human learning feedback (RHLF), guardrails, fine-tuning models using local domain content and data
  • High costs: using smaller models for specific tuned tasks or content domains, and RAG approach to reduce token usage
  • Transparency and accountability: build in approval steps with human actors in the chain, and use streaming responses from each agentic action / tool to return an audit log of inputs, actions and outputs
Are you ready to start your AI transformation?

Spicerack excel in creating, supporting and enhancing innovative business applications and digital platforms, powered by the latest in machine learning and generative AI. Leading the charge in AI integration, we infuse cutting-edge features into our clients' products, services and business processes. Our expertise lies in AI strategy and transformation, crafting advanced solutions with the latest models, and empowering your team to elevate their AI skills.

We’d be delighted to discuss your vision. Email justin@spicerack.co.uk for a no-obligation conversation about incorporating Agentic features into your digital platform.

Let's bring your ideas to life together!