Agentic Workflow

An agentic workflow is a defined sequence of agent-executed steps that produces a marketing output. It is distinct from a 'prompt' in that the unit of analysis is the whole sequence — including its branching, retries, handoffs, and review checkpoints — not a single instruction sent to a single model.

The practical anatomy of an agentic workflow has five parts: an initiation step (what triggers it), a sequence of specialist tasks (each owned by an agent role), a set of handoffs between tasks (with explicit state transfer), one or more human-review checkpoints (with defined approval criteria), and a termination step (where output is committed to a downstream system or surface). Mature programs name their workflows, version them, evaluate them against held-out examples, and treat them as durable institutional artifacts in the same way an earlier decade treated playbooks and SOPs.

The most common failure mode in agentic workflow design is the missing handoff. A workflow looks fine in isolation, fires correctly when triggered, but loses state somewhere between the research agent and the copy agent, or between the copy agent and the review agent. The output that emerges reads like a draft written by someone who did not read the brief. Good workflow design is, in our view, the single largest determinant of whether an agentic marketing system actually produces shippable work — more important than model selection, more important than tool choice, more important than the pricing model.