Assistant, workflow or agent: who decides the next step?
By Oliver Schmalzl · Written: · Archive discovery date:
13 October 2025 · Archive date
With AI tools, similar words come up even though they stand for different ways of working. An assistant, a workflow and an agent can all produce text. The decisive question is: who determines the next step?
A packing list in three variants
An assistant gets a request: "Create a packing list for a one-day trip." It answers, and a person decides whether anything is missing. The collaboration happens in the conversation.
A workflow follows a process fixed in advance. First the length and type of trip are asked, then a suitable template is chosen, and after that the list is created. An AI can also be part of this process; the order stays fixed.
An agent receives a goal and can choose further steps within its permitted options. It could notice that a detail is missing, ask about it and only then revise the list. Which tools it may use for this must be clearly limited. For a text task, access to the necessary content is enough.
This distinction between predefined processes and dynamically chosen steps can also be found in Anthropic's architecture article. In everyday use, however, the terms are not used the same way everywhere.
More autonomy is an additional decision
For a simple packing list, one good request is often enough. A bigger process brings more points where something can be misunderstood. It becomes interesting when several steps are really needed and their result can be checked.
Before choosing a tool, three questions therefore help: What is the goal? Which decisions stay with the person? How do you know the task is finished? That makes it clear what the agent is actually supposed to do.
Original finds
These links were the starting point for this post. The commentary in the text is mine; the linked posts are not my own tests.
- Assistant, workflow or agent? A guide to the terms
- Assistant, workflow or agent? A guide to the terms
- Assistant, workflow or agent? A guide to the terms
- Assistant, workflow or agent? A guide to the terms
- Agents and workflow builders compared
- Five questions to ask about an agent offering
- Can agents replace individual apps?
- The architecture around a language model
About the date: This post was written on 11 October 2026. The archive date corresponds to the earliest related find in the collection, not to a publication at that time. Technical context and sources added later refer to the time of writing.