Pick the right shape
Pick the right shape
Your team has four automation ideas on the board and one budget line. Before choosing tools, you need to stop the agent-shaped answer from being applied to workflow-shaped problems.
Pick the idea that genuinely needs an agent — a system that decides its own steps — rather than a fixed workflow or a single prompt.
Hint
Ask whether the path is known in advance. Known path → workflow; unknown path that reacts to findings → maybe agent.
If you could write the steps down as a checklist before starting, an agent is usually a more expensive checklist.
Why this is the answer
Three of the four ideas have a written path: extract, classify, convert — repetitive steps with checkable outputs. Those are workflows, and they should stay that way. The churn investigation is different: the useful next move depends on the last result, so the sequence cannot be authored in advance. That is when an agent loop can pay — provided it is bounded by a clear question, a budget and a review gate at the end.