Agentic document workflows

The most application-oriented architecture in the survey: end-to-end automation of document-centric work, called Agentic Document Workflows (ADW). These go beyond answering questions to actually processing documents through a multi-step business process.

The workflow: documents are parsed and their key fields extracted (for example, invoice numbers, dates, vendors, line items, payment terms); the system maintains state about the document across steps; it retrieves relevant references and domain-specific guidelines; and intelligent agents apply business rules, perform multi-step reasoning, and generate actionable recommendations, orchestrating parsers, retrievers, and APIs together.

The key advance over both ordinary document processing and ordinary RAG is that ADW maintains state across a multi-step workflow and applies domain logic, rather than answering a single question in isolation. This is where agentic RAG starts to look like genuine knowledge-work automation.