InTouch AI vs AWS Step Functions — Comparison Sheet

InTouch AI in five points: AI is the architecture, not a feature — the vault, connectors, scheduling, RBAC, and audit all sit behind it; self-hostable with a free Personal edition; single-tenant by design; runs behind NAT via Tailscale; real governance layer (RBAC, encryption, audit). Versus Step Functions: a general AI-native engine can do everything a specialized config-era orchestrator does — the reverse is impossible, because you can't bolt an AI center onto a state machine you defined in JSON. Step Functions only runs in AWS. InTouch AI runs on your laptop, your data center, or any cloud — and integrates with AWS through a tool that wraps the entire AWS CLI v2. You get AWS orchestration without AWS lock-in, and you keep running the same platform when next year's migration goes to GCP or on-prem.

The contract, now intelligent. Step Functions gives you a catch state and a retry count — a dumb rule that retries N times and dumps a log. InTouch AI's failure clause is an assessment: it reads the failure, knows why, smart-retries, refreshes an expired token, and surfaces the one sentence that matters. "It broke. Here's why. I fixed it." A JSON state machine cannot say that. Then graduate any proven workflow down the determinism dial — from AI-driven to zero-AI-cost, identical-every-time, fully-audited — as it earns trust. Nobody else gives you the dial.