A Hundred Years of Workflow
A hundred years ago, work was drawn as a flowchart. Today, AI is beginning to read it.
“Workflow” isn't a new word from the age of AI. It has a hundred-year history, and every step along the way answers the same question: how do you get a group of people to do one thing well, reliably?
1921
Drawn
At the annual meeting of the American Society of Mechanical Engineers, the Gilbreths presented “Process Charts” (1921), a set of graphic symbols that drew out every step of a piece of work.
Source: Laue, Mayr & Thalheim, “100 Years of Graphical Business Process Modelling,” EMISA Journal, 2022Free full text
1990
Redesigned
Michael Hammer published “Reengineering Work: Don't Automate, Obliterate” in the Harvard Business Review (1990): don't automate the old process as it is. First remove the steps that add no value, then redesign.
Source: Harvard Business Review, July–August 1990Subscription
1996
Handed to machines
The Workflow Management Coalition (WfMC, founded in 1993) defined workflow in its glossary as the automation of a business process, in whole or in part, during which documents, information or tasks are passed from one participant to another according to a set of rules.
Source: WfMC, Terminology & Glossary, WFMC-TC-1011, 1996University of Edinburgh archive
2024
Read
With large models, workflows gained, for the first time, a participant that can read text and act on it. In “Building effective agents” (2024), Anthropic treats workflows separately from agents: a workflow is where models and tools follow a predefined path.
Source: anthropic.com, December 19, 2024Free full text
Today
Written for AI
What carries a workflow has changed from flowcharts and approval chains to Process Sheets, standard answers and knowledge bases written for AI to read. AI carries out a stretch of the work; people make the judgment calls.
The hardest part of this step isn't technical
Polanyi (1966) wrote: “We can know more than we can tell.” A company's most valuable experience often lies in exactly the part that can't be told. Before AI can read a workflow, someone has to write it down clearly.
Hammer's warning from more than thirty years ago holds true again today: putting AI on top of an old process only makes the old process run a little faster. Don't hand the old process to AI to run faster. Use this moment to rethink that part from scratch.
Source: Polanyi, The Tacit Dimension, 1966Catalog page
What we do is the next step in that hundred years
Puchuang AI helps companies improve their workflows. Drawing on the capabilities of large models, we send Forward Deployed Engineers (FDEs) into your business to write your experience as workflows AI can read, then work with the people who know the business to judge which parts are worth redesigning.
What
Workflow improvement
With what
The capabilities of large models
Who
Forward Deployed Engineers on site, making the calls together with the people who know the business