Hey friends,
I’ve noticed a pattern lately.
Companies come to us asking for AI agents. Autonomous. Intelligent. “Next-gen.”
What they really want is relief.
Relief from teams drowning in repetitive work. Relief from processes that feel heavier every quarter. Relief from the fear that they’re falling behind and don’t quite know why.
And here’s the uncomfortable truth I’ve learned after dozens of these conversations:
Most companies don’t need AI agents.
They need better workflows.
This episode, with Alex Papli from Hypergen, helped crystallise something I’ve been feeling for a while. Not as a theory but as a practical mistake I see costing businesses time, money, and confidence.
When “Agentic” Becomes an Expensive Distraction
There’s a lot of hype around AI agents right now.
The idea sounds seductive: give AI autonomy, let it decide, let it act, let it run.
But Alex framed it in a way that immediately clicked for me.
If you draw your process on a whiteboard and it looks like a fork, if this, then that you don’t need an agent.
That’s a workflow.
You already know the rules. You already understand the decision points. AI’s role here is to read, interpret, and route, not to think freely.
An agent, in the true sense, is when the diagram stops looking like a fork and starts looking like spaghetti.
Too many paths. Too many variables. Too many decisions for a human to pre-define.
That’s when you hand over cognitive responsibility.
And that distinction matters, because confusing the two leads to fragile systems, unpredictable outcomes, and a lot of unnecessary risk.
The Predictability Problem No One Talks About
In business, creativity loves ambiguity.
Operations do not.
One of the strongest themes Alex kept coming back to was predictability.
Workflows with AI embedded inside them are far easier to test, audit, and trust. You can run hundreds of scenarios. You can control permissions. You can reduce the blast radius when something goes wrong.
True agents, the ones making decisions end-to-end, demand far more testing, governance, and maturity than most organisations are ready for.
And yet, many companies jump straight there because it sounds advanced.
That’s the costly mistake.
Most ROI today isn’t in autonomy.
It’s in automation.
The Real Opportunity Hiding in Plain Sight
What struck me most was how much value sits in areas businesses already understand but haven’t revisited with fresh eyes.
These things include contract reviews, tender responses, customer service triage, sales follow-ups, and internal approvals.
These aren’t visionary moonshots. They’re operational drains.
And AI-powered workflows, not agents, can quietly eliminate huge amounts of friction here.
Alex put it simply:
“We’re specialists in search, not AI.”
That line stayed with me.
So much of what feels like intelligence is actually better search, better context, better summarisation, wrapped in software people can actually use.
Governance Isnt the Enemy - Ignorance Is
Traditional governance assumes you know what a system can do.
AI breaks that assumption.
If you don’t understand what’s possible, you can’t control outcomes, no matter how many policies you write.
The answer isn’t fear or heavy-handed restriction.
It’s hands-on literacy.
Build governance into the workflow.
Limit permissions.
Inspect tool calls.
Test aggressively.
Most risks don’t come from AI “thinking badly.”
They come from humans giving it access without understanding consequences.
Personal productivity: I used Claude to clean up my laptop. Dozens of random files were instantly sorted into logical folders and subfolders. What would have taken hours was done in minutes. Proof that AI isn’t just for big business—it’s a personal assistant too.
Why Australia’s Real Advantage Isn’t Models
We also went deep into sovereign AI and landed somewhere unexpected.
The real advantage for Australia isn’t building massive language models.
It’s sovereign capability.
Capturing tacit knowledge.
Turning niche expertise into reusable systems.
Building software that reflects how Australians actually work.
Take customer service as a simple example.
Alex told a story about naming bots, Baz, Susan, Jerry, and how each behaved differently purely because of cultural bias attached to the name.
That’s not trivial.
That’s context.
And context is where real differentiation lives.
The Line That Changed How I Think About Agents
There was one moment I want to leave you with.
Alex said:
“When you absolve your function of making the cognitive decision, that’s when it becomes agentic.”
That’s it.
Not when AI is involved. Not when it’s impressive. But when you stop deciding.
Until then, workflows will take you further than you think.
And they’ll do it safely, predictably, and profitably.
A Calm Takeaway
If you’re exploring AI right now, here’s the quiet nudge I’d offer:
Don’t ask, “How do we use agents?”
Ask, “Which decisions are we ready to hand over?”
Most companies aren’t there yet.
And that’s okay.
There’s enormous leverage waiting in workflows alone.
— Aamir
📲 Resources & Links
🎧 Listen to the Podcast on: Spotify | Apple Podcasts | YouTube
📘 Book: The CEO Who Mocked AI (Until It Made Him Millions) by Aamir Qutub