Chatbot, Workflow, or Agent?

Classify a system from observable behavior rather than marketing language.

Plan for this page

Apply your judgment to a real situation and keep a reusable result.

You will leave with: Summarize what the evidence supports and what remains unknown.
Time: 8 min
Before you begin: Use this when comparing products, describing architecture, assigning risk review, or deciding what questions to ask a vendor or team.
Do this now: Choose one real case, then answer in order without skipping a question.

When to use it

Describe capability, interface, continuation, tools, state, and authority separately. A hybrid classification is acceptable.

What you will make

Continuation distinguishes one response from multi-step work.

A fixed workflow and adaptive selection create different dependencies.

Tool access changes capability and consequence.

Context, task state, and durable state are different.

The same label can hide very different delegated authority.

Reusable result

Summarize what the evidence supports and what remains unknown.

A public interface may not reveal implementation. State unknown when evidence is missing; the worksheet cannot verify hidden behavior.

Use public or sanitized system descriptions. Do not enter internal architecture, credentials, security details, or private logs.

Sources and scope

Established

Explanatory memorandum on the updated OECD definition of an AI systemOECD.AI

Supports product-neutral analysis of objectives, inputs, outputs, and degrees of autonomy; it does not define every marketing use of agent.

Hugging Face Agents Course — IntroductionHugging Face

Provides a technical account of models, tools, actions, and observations; it is ecosystem-specific and not a universal architecture.

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