Think of an ATM. Ten of us ask for $20, and the process is the same for all ten: insert the card, enter the PIN, ask for cash, get $20. That is the first level, deterministic software. Your banking app is the same: every customer sees the same screens in the same order.
The second level is the software that remembers you. Picture a restaurant. The first waiter has served you many times and still has to be told your name, that you have a peanut allergy, that there is a table you hate, and she makes the same mistakes every visit. The second waiter knows the moment you walk in, from the day of the week, whether this is business or a casual dinner, gives you the quiet corner when it is business, and already knows your appetite. The second experience is above and beyond. Amazon is still deterministic underneath, but it knows your address, and an address is a home price, and a home price is an income, so it shows you things in your bracket. From what you buy it knows whether you have a child and whether you are married, and it fills the suggestions from that. YouTube's recommendation engine is the same idea, hit or miss.
The third level is the agent. The second level knows you and shows you things; the third does the work itself. Instead of process automation, we automate the entire role. QuickBooks is a very fancy version of an Excel sheet. It is the program a small business keeps its money in, and an Excel sheet is a grid of numbers on a screen. Before it, a bookkeeper typed everything into that grid and added the calculations by hand. QuickBooks automated many of those processes, and one bookkeeper could do the work five or six used to do on the sheet. That is process automation, and it is where the old software stopped: it could do the process and not the role. Somebody still had to sit at the keyboard, read the statement, decide what each transaction was, and close the month.
In class I hooked an agent up to a bank application and told it, in one sentence, to get me the statement. What did it do first?
It logged in, the way the bookkeeper does. Then it downloaded the statement, pulled fifty-seven transactions out of it, and ran the analysis while I was still talking. It did the role, from the login onward. That is the third level: hook your system up, connect the agent to the bookkeeper's QuickBooks, and your agent does the job that was done by the bookkeeper, end to end.