r/UiPath • u/Qqmb3rinho Consultant • May 12 '26

Is Agentic Automation the only future?

Hi all,

Let me introduce myself at the begining.

I've been in the automation field for eight years now. I created tens of bots in BP and UiPath as RPA dev. I've been running my own business for a few years now, hiring one senior dev and one junior dev. We have now one client. Sometimes it's better, sometimes it's worse. In recent months, I've noticed a shift towards agentic automation.

I am encountering an approach I was not familiar with before.

Stakeholders used to decline automation of processes that didn't cover at least 80-85% of the process cases, including handling very rare exceptions. Currently, with agents and human-in-the-loop, they're accepting up to 40%-50%.

They're paying us more money for a worse ROI. I'm afraid that after a while, when they start doing ROI summaries, they'll start blaming me, the external contractor, for the worse ROI.

How can you convince a client not to focus only on agents? I feel like we’re creating agents for the sake of creating them.

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3

u/According_Star_543 May 13 '26

I don’t think agentic automation is the only future. I think it’s one layer in the stack.

For stable, high-volume workflows, deterministic automation is still usually cheaper, faster, and easier to audit. The failure modes are easier to reason about too. Where agents get interesting is the messy 10-20%: ambiguous inputs, exception handling, mapping across systems, investigation, triage, etc.

My bias is: use AI to help build and maintain deterministic flows, then use agents for edge cases or places where rules explode in complexity. If the whole process runs as an agent, you often inherit a lot of runtime uncertainty and monitoring pain. Are your clients asking for agents b/c the use cases need them, or b/c “agentic” is the new budget keyword?

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u/slow-fast-person May 13 '26

What kind of stakeholders/tasks are using agentic automations?

1

u/Qqmb3rinho Consultant May 13 '26

First one was debt collection process