Agentic Frameworks Are Rediscovering BPM
The orchestration problems "agentic" frameworks describe as novel were solved by BPM years ago
What agentic frameworks are reaching for
What BPM already provides
State persistence / checkpointing
Pause, resume, survive infrastructure failures
Process instance state, persistent across crashes
[Weske 2012]
Durable execution, replay from history
Every step immutably logged; resume from any point
Audit log + event sourcing in BPMN engines
[Ruecker & Strauch 2025]
Saga / compensating actions across services
Local actions with compensations; no distributed locks
BPMN compensation events, transactional sub-processes
[OMG 2011; Bernstein 2009]
Long-running orchestration: retries, timeouts, escalations
Survives hours, days, or weeks of process time
BPMN timer, escalation, and boundary events
[OMG 2011]
Audit trails and approval gates
For agents touching real money and real risk
Process performance mgmt; user-task lifecycle
[van der Aalst 2016; Sinur, Misiak & Biernatowski 2025]
WHAT IS GENUINELY NEW
A new style of decision-making INSIDE a step
An LLM-based worker that selects sub-steps and tools at runtime — at the worker layer, not the process layer
Agentic AI does not abolish BPM. It makes BPM indispensable.
BPM as governance frame · Agents as workers inside it · Hybrid as the mature posture