What is the difference between workflow automation and AI automation?
Workflow automation follows rules you define and produces the same result every time. AI automation makes a judgement, which means it can be wrong — so it needs a human check that deterministic automation does not.
This distinction decides the architecture. Moving a booking into a calendar, reconciling a payment, sending a notification when a stage changes — all of that should be deterministic, because you want it identical every time and you want to be able to reason about why it fired. Drafting a summary or classifying free text cannot be expressed as rules, which is exactly where a model earns its place. Mixing the two, so a model decides whether something happened, is how automation becomes untrustworthy.