Traditional automation is deterministic: if this happens, do that. It's reliable, fast, and cheap to run, but it breaks the moment a situation falls outside the rules it was given.
An AI agent works differently. It's given a goal, access to information and tools, and the latitude to decide how to get there. That makes it well suited to tasks with variation — a support ticket, a candidate CV, a customer enquiry — where no two cases look exactly alike.
The right answer for most businesses isn't 'agents instead of automation' — it's knowing which parts of a workflow need judgment and which just need to run the same way every time, and building each accordingly.