Building AI Agents That Actually Work in Business Workflows

Everyone is talking about AI agents. The pitch is compelling: autonomous software that reasons, plans, and executes multi-step tasks without human intervention. The reality is more nuanced. Most businesses do not need a fully autonomous agent. They need targeted automation with intelligence at specific decision points. I run Syntora, a consultancy that builds custom AI automation for small and mid-size businesses. Over the past year, I have built and deployed production agents using the Claude API from Anthropic. Some worked exactly as planned. Others taught me expensive lessons about where agents break down. This is what I have learned about which patterns actually work and which ones will burn your budget before delivering value. Can an Agentic AI Handle Complex Decision-Making in Business Workflows? Yes, but only within well-defined boundaries. The word "complex" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that question. An agent can handle complex classification, complex extraction, and com