Why there is confusion around Automation and Agentic AI
Why there is confusion around Automation and Agentic AIBenjamin Etienne13 min read·Jul 17, 2025--8ListenShareYou’re not really building agents, are you ?TL,DR; An agent isn’t just told what to do (automation) or how to call a specific function (function calling). An agent is given a mission, and it figures out the how, adapting along the way. It’s the difference between a self-driving car (an agent trying to reach a destination, dynamically avoiding obstacles) and cruise control (automation).Introduction: Are We All Just Confused?Ok, yet another article about agents, but I am not here to tell you how marvelous and revolutionary they are.
- ▪Why there is confusion around Automation and Agentic AIBenjamin Etienne13 min read·Jul 17, 2025--8ListenShareYou’re not really building agents, are you ?TL,DR; An agent isn’t just told what to do (automation) or how to call a specific funct
- ▪An agent is given a mission, and it figures out the how, adapting along the way.
- ▪It’s the difference between a self-driving car (an agent trying to reach a destination, dynamically avoiding obstacles) and cruise control (automation).Introduction: Are We All Just Confused?Ok, yet another article about agents, but I am no
Hacker News (AI / LLM) files mainly under ai. We currently carry 3,279 of its stories.
Story provenance
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Medium |
| Canonical URL | https://medium.com/data-science-collective/why-there-is-confusion-around-automation-and-agentic-ai-1a4c33860736 |
| Publication time | Sat, 25 Jul 2026 15:17:11 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-07-25T15:27:17.909Z |
| Last seen | 2026-07-25T15:27:17.909Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | WLA7r2wvB46R |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Why there is confusion around Automation and Agentic AIBenjamin Etienne13 min read·Jul 17, 2025--8ListenShareYou’re not really building agents, are you ?TL,DR; An agent isn’t just told what to do (automation) or how to call a specific function (function calling). An agent is given a mission, and it figures out the how, adapting along the way. It’s the difference between a self-driving car (an agent trying to reach a destination, dynamically avoiding obstacles) and cruise control (automation).Introduction: Are We All Just Confused?Ok, yet another article about agents, but I am not here to tell you how marvelous and revolutionary they are.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Medium.
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