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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 Manage workflows and chat & voice agents switched on. Your Chat & Voice Agent 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 Chat & Voice Agent 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 chat & voice agents. Coworkers also work with each other, with no workflow in between. One can hand part of a job to another coworker, who does it as a task of its own and reports back. Despite the name, a dynamic workflow isn’t a workflow. It’s a coworker’s team of temporary helpers for one big job. The two meet at Make repeatable on a completed run. It saves the dynamic workflow and adds a workflow that hands the job to your coworker whenever it’s triggered.

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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 Chat & Voice Agent

For talking to customers.