# Section 3: Tell Agentic AI, Chatbots and Workflows Apart

One product can be called an assistant, an agent and an automation tool, and each name tells you something different. This section gives you the questions that show what a product actually does: how its steps are chosen, what starts its work, and which actions still need your permission.

## Is ChatGPT an AI agent?

ChatGPT can act as an agent when it chooses steps and uses tools to complete a task. Not every reply works that way. Asked for a current price, it could answer from what the model learned in training and give you an older figure. With web tools available, it can search, read the pricing page and give you the source. When the model chooses a next action from what it finds and uses tools to continue toward your result, the work is agentic, and the system doing it is an agent. Finding pages, reading prices and preparing the answer form a workflow. When the model chooses and takes actions inside it, that is an agentic workflow. Judge the task, the tools and the choices rather than the product name.

## Prepared steps and model choices

A chat window shows how you talk to the software, not how it chooses its steps. For a supplier-price comparison, a fixed workflow opens each saved page, reads the price, compares it with last week's price and writes the report, and it marks a missing price for you to check. Somebody prepared those steps before the job began. An agent can choose some next actions while it works: when a saved page has lost its price, it can search the supplier's website. A long list of steps in a prompt does not tell you which kind of system carries them out, and both kinds can use web tools. They also work together, with an agent finding prices and a fixed calculation working out each change. Check the products, the prices and the calculations before you use the report, whichever system produced it.

## What starts the work

A job can start when you ask (a manual start), at a configured time such as every Monday at 9 a.m. (a scheduled start), or when something happens, such as an invoice email arriving (an event start). The request, time or event is the trigger. It tells you when work begins, not how the steps are chosen, so a scheduled job can still be a fixed workflow. A notification that an invoice arrived does not show that its details were added to your spreadsheet. Describe a job with both its start and the result you expect: "When an invoice email arrives, add its details to this spreadsheet."

## Assistant, agent, agentic AI and automation

A customer emails an online shop asking where an order is. The product that helps you prepare the reply is an assistant, because it helps you. When the model finds the delivery is late and chooses to check the tracking update before writing, the system is an agent and its way of working is agentic. Agentic AI means AI choosing and taking actions toward a goal. When the software prepares a reply whenever an email arrives, that is automation, and an automated process can follow fixed steps or use an agent. Reading an order, preparing a message and sending it are separate actions, so you can allow replies to be prepared and still approve each one before it is sent.

## Talking about it at work

The Meeting vocabulary companion gives twelve terms, each with a sentence you can use in a meeting and the lecture where it was explained. Adapt the example to your work while keeping the meaning.

## Which shape was that?

In the shop example, a prepared workflow could look up the order and draft a reply with fixed steps. In the agentic version, the model found the delivery was late and chose an extra tracking check. A tool supplied the current information, and sending stayed a separate action that needs permission. The email's arrival could start the process automatically, or a person could start it. The trigger tells you when the job begins, and the later choices tell you how it works.