AWS re:Invent 2025-Building workflows of your choosing: agents, copilots, and everything in between

Summary of AWS re:Invent 2025 Presentation: "Building workflows of your choosing: agents, copilots, and everything in between"

Overview

• The presentation discusses the evolution of workflows and the strategic use of AI-driven orchestration to manage modern IT environments.
• It explores the blending of deterministic and agentic workflows, with human judgment integrated at critical decision points.
• The focus is on using AWS for infrastructure management and Tines for AI orchestration to enable secure, intelligent execution at scale.

The Changing IT Landscape

• Modern IT environments are defined by three core pillars:
  1. Infrastructure: The digital fabric of systems, data, APIs, and tools that generate millions of signals and events.
  2. Automation & AI: The need for intelligent workflows and agents to manage this complexity.
  3. Human Judgment: The strategic operators who make critical decisions and hold final accountability.
• The intersection of these pillars is where Tines, an intelligent workflow platform, operates to keep operations secure, intelligent, and aligned with business goals.

The Evolution of Workflows

• Highly deterministic workflows with fixed logic and predictable results are useful for tasks like provisioning and deprovisioning.
• However, when context shifts or decisions require nuance and judgment, agentic workflows that can interpret, reason, and adapt become valuable.
• The goal is not to replace one with the other, but to blend deterministic and agentic workflows based on the specific needs and risk tolerance.

AI Agents in Tines

• Tines allows users to build their own AI agents tailored to their business needs, rather than imposing a specific definition.
• Agents can be part of any workflow process, with Tines providing the orchestration and governance to scale their use across the organization.
• Tines offers pre-built "stories" (workflows) and templates as accelerators, as well as the ability to build custom agents from scratch.

Blending Deterministic and Agentic Workflows

• Deterministic workflows are best suited for critical, highly predictable tasks with low risk tolerance.
• Agentic workflows offer flexibility and adaptability, but may require human oversight for the most important decisions.
• Tines allows users to script rules, layer in reasoning, and insert human checkpoints where necessary, blending the two approaches.

The Role of Human Judgment

• Human judgment is not a "fail-safe" but a deliberate design choice, as there are always nuances and exceptions that require human review and approval.
• Tines enables users to choose what runs automatically and what needs human review, embedding this oversight into the workflows.
• Tines offers both chat-based and task-based agents, allowing for human-in-the-loop interaction or autonomous execution.

Example Use Case: Infrastructure Monitoring and Scaling

• The presentation demonstrates a Tines workflow that monitors EC2 instances for high CPU utilization.
• When utilization exceeds a certain threshold, an AI agent creates a case in Tines and sends a notification to the on-call engineer in Slack for approval.
• If approved, the agent automatically resizes the instance to address the high utilization, with all actions and decisions recorded for auditability.

Key Takeaways

• Intelligent workflows that blend deterministic and agentic approaches, with human judgment integrated, are the key to unlocking AI's true potential.
• Tines provides the platform to govern these workflows end-to-end, shifting the role from gatekeeper to orchestrator.
• AWS provides the reliable infrastructure, while Tines offers the control and governance through customizable policies, SOPs, and prompts.
• Organizations can gain speed and efficiency without sacrificing control by leveraging this combined approach.