Every team we talk to has at least one process they want to "fix with AI." Sometimes that's right. Often it isn't.
If the rules governing a decision are fully known and rarely change, a deterministic workflow engine will be cheaper, faster, and easier to debug than an LLM call. Save the model for the parts of the process that involve judgment, unstructured input, or language understanding — and wire deterministic logic around it for everything else.
The test we use internally: can you write the business rule as a flowchart without any fuzziness? If yes, automate it with code. If the rule requires interpreting a sentence, an image, or an ambiguous customer request, that's where a model earns its cost.