Everyone's building automation with n8n, but most of it doesn't actually work in production. Your workflow handles 60% of cases perfectly. Then reality hits an edge case and the whole thing breaks. It's either a customer's message doesn't match your expected pattern, or a decision needs context your rules don't capture. Suddenly someone's babysitting an automated process that was supposed to be autonomous. That's the old automation model. Here's what changed in 2026: you can now layer AI agents