What is an Agentic Workflow?

An Agentic Workflow is a task design pattern in which an LLM does not just generate text but plans, picks tools and iterates until a goal is met. Unlike a single completion call, the workflow contains feedback loops, branching and explicit success criteria, which makes it suitable for commerce operations that previously required human judgement.

Definition

A workflow exposes the model to a goal description, an inventory of tools and a stopping condition. The model proposes an action, the runtime executes it through Tool Use or Function Calling, the result is appended to the context, and the loop continues until the model emits a final answer or a guard triggers. Patterns include ReAct (reason then act), Reflexion (self-critique between steps), planner-executor splits and tree search for problems with multiple valid plans. Workflows are bounded by step counts, token budgets and wall-clock timeouts to keep behaviour deterministic enough for production. Eval harnesses replay traces against golden outcomes to catch regressions when prompts or model versions change.

Why it matters

Agentic Workflows convert vague intents like "rewrite the autumn campaign landing pages in a friendlier tone" into completed work, not just suggestions. They let commerce teams automate long-tail tasks that never justified bespoke code, and they integrate cleanly with Agentic Commerce stacks where the AI layer sits between the Storefront and the Commerce Engine. The trade-off is operational: every loop adds latency, cost and a chance of Hallucination, so workflows need Guardrails, retries and human-in-the-loop checkpoints for irreversible actions like price changes or publication.

Use cases

A catalog-cleanup workflow iterates over SKUs, fetches missing attributes from supplier feeds, validates them against a schema and writes them back through a PIM tool. A localization workflow translates content into ten markets, then a critic agent rates each output and re-runs failed ones with a stricter prompt. A campaign workflow plans variants for an A/B test, ships them to the CMS and waits for Autonomous A/B Testing results before promoting the winner.

Related

Explore Agentic Frontend Management Platform · Composable Digital Experience Platform.