I spent the last few decades helping businesses to automate their SOPs (Standard Operating Processes) with a range of technologies; Excel spreadsheets, Javascript webapps, mobile apps, Notion, Coda, Airtable, Make, and N8N. Then 3 years ago, clients started turning to me for some leadership about these new-fangled LLMs (Large Language Models) that were being hyped as the next big thing. So I tried ChatGPT and researched LangChain for building AI solutions - and I was NOT impressed! Firstly; I HATED "Prompt Engineering" because it was NOT engineering - it was squishy, verbose, black-magic-ish and unreliable. Maybe it was great for sales letters or marketing materials. Or extracting actions from long meeting transcripts. But it was not at all obvious how it could help my clients to automate their business processes. All that hype - but where was the beef? Then I began to see how AI might be used in workflows - by building AI Agents that were expert at doing specific tasks within a bigger workflow. Freeing our best people from dull, repetative, boring, low-value clerical work. But how? First I used LangChain to build these agents - and they were quite successful - in a limited way. LangChain needed good Python programming skills and the resulting AI Agents were not easy to embed into our existing automated workflows. But making several agents this way allowed me to see the pattern - and I began to see how these agents could be made using our regular no-code tools (like Notion, Coda, Airtable etc). I replaced the Langchain components with no-code stuff such as Tables, Formulas, Information Pages, and the new AI features that all these no-code tools now have. Suddenly it all made more sense - to me and to my clients. Ordinary business managers could now add AI Agents to their existing workflows - no plugins, no packs, no programming, no API calls. And then I figured out how to include "Knowledge Bases" into these Agents using the tools existing document editing features - now our Agents could be 'trained' using our existing Policy & Procedures documentations.