Companies Redesign Workflows Before Adding AI Agents

Product Coalition author Weiwei Hu argues that companies should redesign work before adding AI agents, using enterprise examples where teams kept manual Excel, email, and slide-deck handoffs under a new AI layer. The piece is not a product launch; it is a practitioner warning that agents cannot recover tacit knowledge, unclear data ownership, or missing metrics after deployment. For teams, the useful action is to map where AI creates measurable value, define data contracts and checkpoints, assign human oversight, and track business outcomes rather than chatbot usage. Reworked and McKinsey context point in the same direction: agentic systems work best when the workflow is rebuilt around the decision path, not bolted onto broken process.