From the threads: AI agents for workflows — What’s working and what’s not
As enterprises seek new ways to automate workflows, AI agents have emerged as one of the hottest topics in tech. But beyond the hype and headline use cases, what’s actually working in the field? And what are the friction points still slowing adoption?
Reddit threads such as r/productivity and r/LangChain are filled with first-hand experiences from early adopters, skeptics, and builders. According to Reddit users, AI agents for workflows are making progress, but there’s still plenty of room for growth. Here’s what we uncovered, and how Fortude’s agents built into Charlie – its AI knowledge assistant are already addressing some of these critical pain points.
The promise of AI agents: Delegation, not just automation
In theory, AI agents represent a step beyond rule-based automation. These agents are designed to act autonomously within defined parameters, reasoning through tasks, making decisions, and even collaborating with other agents or systems. On paper, they promise scalable workflow orchestration and time savings across knowledge work, operations, and support functions.
But as one Reddit user aptly put it:
This sentiment is echoed across dozens of threads, where users report AI agents that shine at narrow, well-defined tasks but struggle with multi-step processes, data context, and reliability.
The aspiration is clear: enterprises want intelligent assistants that go beyond static RPA scripts. But the road to agentic maturity is paved with cautionary tales. The stakes are especially high in mission-critical systems, where even small deviations can cause business disruptions.
What’s working: Narrow tasks, busywork, and retrieval
Despite the skepticism, many Reddit users shared use cases where AI agents are already providing value:
- Email and task triage: Agents that sort, tag, and prioritize tickets or emails, especially in internal support workflows.
- RAG-style knowledge lookups: Summarizing product documentation, answering common internal questions, and streamlining information retrieval.
- Daily summaries and updates: Generating Slack or email digests from meeting notes or project management tools.
- ERP data pre-fetching and autofill: Automatically populating forms or dashboards based on user queries.
One user noted:
Others highlighted:
- Document summarization to extract insights from lengthy SOPs or compliance guidelines.
- HR query bots that surface policies, time-off balances, and onboarding checklists on demand.
- Agent chaining to automate sequences like lead qualification, CRM update, meeting booking.
These narrow applications reduce time on repetitive tasks and support faster access to structured knowledge, with lower risk.
What’s not working yet: Accuracy, orchestration & observability
The Reddit community was just as vocal about what’s not working:
- Compounding failure rates: As one user shared, a 8-step workflow with 90% accuracy per step results in only 43% success overall. Error propagation remains a major concern.
- Context drift and hallucination: Agents still struggle to consistently retain context over long tasks or across systems.
- Lack of observability: Builders warn that without a monitoring layer, it’s impossible to understand why an agent behaved a certain way or where it went off track.
- Hard-to-scale integrations: Connecting agents to legacy systems, CRMs, or ERPs often requires custom APIs, tools, or middleware.
One user noted:
“The biggest challenge is maintenance: agents need clear rules, monitoring, and fallback protocols, otherwise small errors snowball fast.” -r/LangChain-
Another user mentions:
“Biggest challenges are context management, trust, and integrating with internal systems.” -r/LangChain-
These cautionary notes echo a common refrain: start small, validate often, and monitor everything.
Meet Charlie: Fortude’s answer to practical AI agent challenges
At Fortude, we’re not just following the AI agent conversation, we’re actively shaping it with Charlie, our enterprise-grade AI assistant. Built on a Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) framework, Charlie is evolving from a knowledge assistant into an agentic AI platform with real-world impact.
Unlike general-purpose agents that try to do everything, Charlie is purpose-built for enterprise workflows. Each use case is designed around domain-specific pain points, with built-in safeguards, monitoring, and explainability baked into the design.
Let’s explore how Charlie is solving the pain points that Reddit builders are wrestling with.
1. Inventory levelling agent
Charlie’s inventory management agent uses real-time demand signals to assess stock levels and suggest redistribution between locations. This reduces stockouts and overstock scenarios without human intervention.
- Why it matters: It’s a tightly scoped, high-value task, exactly what Reddit users suggest agents should start with.
2. M3 release impact analysis
When a new Infor M3 release is published, a set of coordinated agents, including document parsers and source code analyzers, automatically identify impacted modules and generate Jira tickets for consultants.
- Why it matters: It removes 80–90% of manual analysis effort, while maintaining traceability and confidence through built-in validation layers.
3. Signal-based demand forecasting
This Charlie agent blends internal ERP data with external signals (e.g., weather, trends) to forecast SKU-level demand for fashion retailers. It recommends POs and shipment timelines in a single automated pass.
- Why it matters: Combines structured planning logic with adaptive context awareness, a step toward trustworthy decision-making.
4. MCP for ERP interoperability
Charlie integrates with Fortude’s Model Context Protocol (MCP), enabling secure and reusable access to Infor ERP systems. It acts as a translator layer, giving AI agents safe access to business data.
- Why it matters: This solves a massive pain point raised in Reddit threads: messy, inconsistent ERP integrations.
5. CharlieX: Democratizing enterprise intelligence
CharlieX, a companion to Charlie, focuses on enterprise analytics. It connects directly to ERP/CRM data and lets business users ask natural-language questions, surfacing patterns, anomalies, and recommendations in seconds.
- Why it matters: This bridges the gap between AI and decision-makers, allowing agents to proactively suggest actions instead of just returning results.
Best practices from the field: Lessons from Reddit and the enterprise
From hundreds of comments and real-world use cases, a few best practices emerge:
- Start narrow: Choose one pain point with clear ROI. Avoid broad, loosely scoped workflows.
- Build feedback loops: Use human-in-the-loop validation, even in production.
- Prioritize observability: Include logging, tracing, and evaluation from day one.
- Structure data access: Use protocols like MCP to define safe, scalable interfaces.
- Accept imperfection: Even a 70% reliable agent can drive ROI if paired with intelligent fallback mechanisms.
A realistic outlook: What’s next for AI agents in workflows?
The community sentiment is clear: AI agents are promising, but expectations need calibration. They’re not magic wands or full-time employees. But they can become trusted collaborators for narrow, repeatable workflows, especially when paired with structured validation, observability, and human oversight.
At Fortude, we believe the key is intentional design. Charlie isn’t trying to replace your workforce, it’s built to assist it with reliable, proactive, context-aware support.
As AI tooling matures and orchestration stacks become more robust, we expect agent adoption to move from niche experiments to mainstream deployments, with enterprises like ours leading the way.
Beyond the trend
Reddit threads reveal a grounded reality: AI agents for workflows are not yet plug-and-play, but the right design makes all the difference. Fortude’s Charlie and CharlieX are built with this in mind, blending retrieval intelligence, integration layers, and practical automation into agentic AI that gets work done.
Want to see Charlie in action?
Connect with Fortude and discover how agentic AI can solve your workflow bottlenecks today.
FAQs
Not entirely, and that’s actually a good thing. Today’s AI agents are exceptionally strong at automating 60–80% of routine, rules-based, and repetitive steps that make up the bulk of enterprise workflows. They can read documents, extract data, trigger actions in connected systems, validate information, and escalate issues, all without human intervention. However, most enterprise workflows include judgment-heavy steps: evaluating exceptions, interpreting ambiguous data, approving high-risk transactions, or making decisions tied to strategic or financial impacts. These are areas where human oversight still adds essential value.
An AI agent becomes agentic when it does more than simply respond to a user’s prompt.
Agentic AI operates with autonomy, meaning it can understand a goal or desired outcome, break down goals into actionable steps, plan and execute a sequence of tasks across multiple systems, monitor its own progress, and adapt when something changes. In other words, agentic AI behaves more like a digital colleague than a traditional chatbot.
Workflow agents deliver the greatest impact in industries with complex processes and high volumes of repetitive tasks. Sectors such as supply chain and manufacturing, HR, ERP consulting, customer support, and finance benefit significantly from automated data handling, validation, routing, and decision support. These industries often rely on legacy systems and time-sensitive operations, making workflow agents ideal for reducing manual effort, improving accuracy, and streamlining end-to-end processes at scale.
Charlie is an enterprise-ready workflow automation platform built for ERP, supply chain, HR, and other mission-critical operations. It integrates deeply with systems like Infor and Dynamics 365, orchestrates multiple specialized AI agents, and runs on an enterprise-grade, secure architecture. With purpose-built intelligent agents and continuous learning, Charlie automates complex workflows, enhances decision-making, and adapts over time, going far beyond chat-based assistance to execute real work at scale.
Getting started with Charlie is simple and aligned to your organization’s maturity. Fortude begins with a consultation to identify high-impact workflows, followed by a demo to map use cases. A pilot deployment automates a small set of workflows to validate impact, after which automation scales across teams and processes. To explore the possibilities, you can request a demo or tailored assessment from Fortude.
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