The original title is "Your AI Agents Need Finite State Machines (FSMs)"

Short summary

AI agents that infer business workflows from prompts introduce unnecessary operational risk because a probabilistic system is discovering the process while executing it. Finite state machines solve this by explicitly modeling states, valid transitions, required conditions, and associated actions. The AI then only decides which valid action is most appropriate rather than inventing the workflow. This makes processes testable, auditable, and verifiable — business rules belong in explicit definitions, not in prompts.

• •Autonomous agents that infer business workflows from prompts create operational risk and are hard to audit
• •Finite state machines explicitly define states, transitions, conditions, and actions for AI-driven workflows
• •FSMs constrain AI to choosing among valid actions rather than discovering the process itself

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.