The Rise of Agentic Workflows: Why Businesses Are Adopting Them

Abstract

Agentic workflows represent the next evolutionary step beyond traditional robotic process automation (RPA) and simple rule-based orchestration. Unlike conventional automation tools that execute predefined scripts, agentic workflows employ autonomous AI agents capable of reasoning, planning, multi-step decision-making, tool use, and self-correction in dynamic environments. This paper examines the technological, economic, and organizational drivers behind the rapid enterprise adoption of agentic systems in 2024–2025. Through industry case studies and adoption surveys, we demonstrate that organizations deploying agentic workflows are achieving 3–8× higher automation rates in knowledge-work processes previously considered “unautomatable.” The shift is driven by dramatic improvements in large language models, the maturation of agent frameworks, falling inference costs, and the urgent need to counter shrinking workforces and rising labor costs.