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The missing pieces of workflow automation — Shirsha Chaudhuri, Thomson Reuters Labs
Original: The missing pieces of workflow automation — Shirsha Chaudhuri, Thomson Reuters Labs
Takeaway
Enterprise agentic workflow automation is bottlenecked by legacy connectors, reliability metrics, standardization, and human-agent collaborative UX — not by model capability.
Summary
- Shirsha Chaudhuri (Thomson Reuters Labs) traces the Enterprise AI journey: 2023 democratization (Open Arena playground), 2024 RAG/agents/frameworks, now reimagining full workflows.
- Missing pieces blocking agentic workflow automation: connectors to legacy systems (71% of Fortune 500 still run mainframe; 68% of production workloads), ROI/reliability metrics that stakeholders trust.
- Need visionary domain SMEs to co-reimagine processes; standardization of how agents are built, packaged, and deployed.
- Context distribution problem: data lives across logs, tickets, chats, mainframes — correlating a single transaction across systems is a major blocker.
- Collaborative human+agent UX, AI governance translated into agentic architecture layers, and clear deterministic-vs-agent control boundaries remain open.
agentsenterpriseworkflow-automation
Original description
Gen AI is cool, but what does that mean for your function? This is a talk on when AI hit the road, and where it missed and why. 2024 has been such a confusing year! Tech giants vs startups, established service providers vs internal redefinition of tool stack, trials to licenses, and more. As a functional leader for any org, how do you know the state of AI for your business processes? 2024 has been the year we experimented to find that answer. We tried out lots of vendors, open source, even in-house solutions for AI driven workflow automation and business processes across different functions in our enterprise. Join me as we describe the potential for Agentic workflows, learning from our narrative of what worked in 2024, and what we want changing in 2025. Recorded live at the Leadership Track Session Day from the AI Engineer Summit 2025 in New York. Learn more at https://ai.engineer and purchase tickets to our next event, the AI Engineer World's Fair, in SF June 3 - 5 here: https://ti.to/software-3/ai-engineer-worlds-fair-2025 About Shirsha Shirsha heads the co-innovation team in TR Labs that builds solutions for the Editorial and Internal teams in Thomson Reuters. She is passionate about successful operationalizing and sustenance of AI solutions. She works with communities on AI for good, societal impact projects and in the tech for D&I space. She loves to network with people who are using AI and modern tech for building a better world that is more inclusive, more digital and together a better tomorrow.