Are AI agents solving the wrong problem?

Over the past year, we’ve spent a lot of time asking how to make AI agents more autonomous.

But while building Flowvenue, I started to question whether autonomy is actually the main problem.

Real businesses don’t run on prompts.

They run on processes:

• states that must persist over time

• approvals and permissions

• business rules and exceptions

• handoffs between people and systems

• deadlines and waiting states

• auditability and accountability

An AI agent can be extremely intelligent and still be unreliable at running a real business process end to end.

That led us to a different idea:

What if AI shouldn’t replace the process? What if AI should operate inside an executable process?

In Flowvenue, we’re exploring this by separating two layers:

• the process layer, which defines state, rules, actions, permissions and deterministic steps

• the AI layer, which interprets intent, reasons, handles ambiguity and decides how to interact with that process

The same process can then be accessed through a web interface, chat, Microsoft Teams, WhatsApp, or by external AI clients through MCP.

My current belief is that the future of enterprise AI may be less about “agents that can do anything” and more about giving AI a safe, stateful and executable environment in which to act.

I’m curious how other builders see this:

Should AI agents own workflows — or should workflows constrain and empower AI agents?