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CogniAgent gives you three ways to get work done automatically. They look similar from a distance and they are not interchangeable. Picking the right one matters more than how well you configure it.

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The short answer

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The real distinction

It isn’t about complexity. Plenty of workflows are more complicated than anything a coworker does. It’s about whether you can write the steps down in advance. If you can — “when an order arrives, check stock, then email the customer, then update the sheet” — a workflow does it faster, cheaper, and identically every time. Predictability is the feature. If you can’t — “find out why this customer churned” — then no flowchart survives contact with the answer. What you need is something that decides the next step based on what the last one turned up. That’s a coworker.
A useful test: could you hand this to a new starter as a written checklist, and would they get it right? If yes, build a workflow. If they’d have to use judgement, hire a coworker.

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Side by side

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Signs you picked wrong

You built a workflow and it keeps breaking. Every failure adds another branch, and the diagram has more error handling than logic. The job needed judgement. Hand it to a coworker. You use a coworker for the same thing every day and always get the same answer. You’re paying for thinking that isn’t needed. Build a workflow — or have your coworker build one for you, which it can do with workflows and flows switched on. Your conversation flow keeps hitting questions it wasn’t designed for. Some of those may belong to a coworker working behind it.

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They work together

This isn’t a choice you make once for the whole company. The strongest setups use all three:
  • A workflow handles the volume — every order, every ticket, every form
  • It escalates the odd ones to a coworker, which can research, decide and act
  • A conversation flow handles the customer-facing dialogue, and a coworker does the work behind it
A coworker can start your workflows and read what came out of them. See Running your workflows and flows.

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Common questions

No — it does something a workflow can’t, which is decide. If the steps are fixed, a workflow is genuinely the better tool and you shouldn’t pay for reasoning you don’t need.
Yes. Describe what you want automated and it proposes one; you approve before anything is created. It’s a good way to turn work you’ve been doing manually into something repeatable.
A coworker, if you’re evaluating. It’s the fastest thing to get value from — hire one and give it a real task in ten minutes with nothing to configure.
Yes, and it’s a common pattern — the workflow handles the routine cases at volume and passes anything unusual to a coworker to sort out.

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Next steps

Quickstart

Try a coworker in ten minutes.

How Cowork works

The mental model.

Build a workflow

For work that never varies.

Build a conversation flow

For talking to customers.