Outcome: attendees can decide which work belongs in a deterministic automation, which genuinely benefits from an AI agent, and how to make the handoff safe.

This intermediate 40-minute live virtual architecture walkthrough follows one business request through intake, classification, proposed action, human approval, execution, receipt, and recovery. We use a Power Automate-style flow as the deterministic backbone and introduce an agent only where ambiguity earns its cost. Then we add the controls that demos omit: a typed handoff contract, action envelopes binding purpose and scope, least-privilege tools, idempotency keys, bounded retries, durable decision and outcome receipts, and escalation after an ambiguous timeout.

The session combines 18+ years of production software and distributed-systems work, current Azure AI Foundry agent and MCP in .NET delivery, and the workflow-design practice behind my 2026 Packt book, AI for Everyday Automation: 7 AI Workflows to Save Hours at Work Every Week. The patterns are vendor-neutral and illustrated with public reference systems, not presented as customer deployments. Attendees leave with a decision matrix, a handoff contract, and four recovery tests they can apply to Power Automate, Copilot Studio, or custom Foundry solutions.