World's Fair 2025
How to build Enterprise Aware Agents - Chau Tran, Glean
Overview
This talk explores the distinction between AI workflows and agents, highlighting their respective strengths and weaknesses. It proposes that agents can be viewed as tools that generate workflows, suggesting a powerful synergy between the two. The discussion also delves into methods for building enterprise-aware agents, emphasizing the importance of incorporating business-specific knowledge and processes.
Who should watch
- AI engineers and builders
- Product Managers
- Those looking to automate complex business processes
- Anyone evaluating the use of agents versus structured workflows
Key takeaways
- Workflows offer structure and predictability, ideal for automating repetitive tasks and encoding existing business knowledge. They are generally lower cost, lower latency, and easier to debug.
- Agents are more open-ended, dynamically deciding steps and tools to achieve a task. They are suited for research and leveraging improving LLM capabilities but can be higher cost and latency.
- Agents can be seen as systems that generate workflows. An agent takes a task and outputs a sequence of steps, which is essentially a workflow.
- Workflows can be used to evaluate agents by comparing their generated steps against predefined "golden workflows."
- "Golden workflows" can also serve as training data for agents, enabling them to execute known processes while retaining the ability to compose and extend them.
- Agents can assist in workflow building by generating workflows from natural language descriptions, allowing users to refine the output.
- Agents can act as workflow discovery engines, identifying and saving successful task execution paths as new workflows over time.
- Fine-tuning is effective for learning generalized behaviors when ample data is available but requires retraining for changes and offers less flexibility for personalization.
Notable quotes
*Workflows are sort of like the Toyota of AI systems. It's very predictable.*
*Agents are sort of like the Tesla of AI systems. Like it's more open-ended.*
*What if you don't really have to choose? If you think of agent what they do is when you give the agent a task it will figure out the steps that needs to be done to achieve that task.*
Unofficial community note. Prefer the recording for nuance.