In 1776 Adam Smith watched ten people make 48,000 pins in a day. Working alone, none of them could have made twenty. The three forces he named explain that 240-fold gap, and they explain why specialist AI agents work and monolithic chatbots do not.
n8n, created by Jan Oberhauser, charges per workflow execution not per operation - a 200-node workflow costs the same as a 2-node one. That sounds great until you hit the steep learning curve and self-hosting burden that technical teams need to evaluate first.
Peter Drucker coined the term knowledge worker in 1959, predicting a shift from manual labor to judgment-based work. Today roughly 50% of jobs fit that description, yet without structured workflows, that brainpower gets wasted on remembering steps instead of solving real problems.
AI works best when it augments human judgment rather than replacing it. McKinsey research shows only 21% of organizations have redesigned workflows for AI, and that gap explains most failures.