DeepSeek V4 Pro vs Grok 4.5 for workflow automation
Grok 4.5 wins, 86–81
Same 12 workflow automation tasks, marked blind by three rival labs. Grok 4.5 took 6 tasks, DeepSeek V4 Pro took 1, 5 tied. Tested 18 Aug 2026.
Where they differed most
A 40-person UK company wants to automate expense reimbursement end to end: receipt photographed, read, categorised, approved, paid into the employee's bank account, posted to the ledger. The finance director's brief is 'no human touches it under £100'. Go through the process and mark, for each stage, whether it can be automated, automated with a check, or must stay with a person — and give the reason in terms of what goes wrong, not in terms of policy. Name the two stages where full automation would be genuinely dangerous for a company this size, and say what the cheapest sufficient control is at each: not the most thorough control, the cheapest one that actually catches the thing.
**Process stages and automation assessment** | Stage | Assessment | Reason (what goes wrong) | |-------|-------------|---------------------------| | **Receipt photographed** | Must stay with a person | A physical receipt must be handled and captured by the employee; no machine can take a photo of a paper receipt without human action. | | **Read (OCR extraction)** | Automated with a check | OCR can misread amounts, dates or vendor names due to crumpled, faded or poorly lit receipts, leading to incorrect reimbursement. The cheapest effective che…
**Receipt photographed → Read → Categorised → Approved → Paid → Posted to ledger** ### Stage-by-stage | Stage | Automation | What actually goes wrong | |---|---|---| | **Receipt photographed** | Automate | Employee submits blurry/cropped/partial images, photos of screens, or secondary photos of already-submitted receipts. Capture itself is fine as employee self-serve; failure is quality and uniqueness of the image. | | **Read (OCR/extraction)** | Automate with a check | Mis-reads total vs line items, VAT, date, currency, or merchant; confuses…
Task by task
| Task | DeepSeek V4 Pro | Grok 4.5 |
|---|---|---|
| The MOT reminder nobody sends | 8 | 8 |
| The spec, as JSON | 8 | 8 |
| Where the human stays | 6 | 8 |
| The unhappy paths are the job | 8 | 8 |
| Do not automate this | 9 | 10 |
| It fired twice | 9 | 8 |
| The spreadsheet that runs the business | 8 | 9 |
| The alert that wakes someone up | 8 | 9 |
| How long it really takes | 8 | 9 |
| No API, no chance? | 8 | 9 |
| Rules, not guesses | 8 | 8 |
| Refuse the scraper | 9 | 9 |
Full receipts: DeepSeek V4 Pro, Grok 4.5 · judges claude-sonnet-5, gemini-3.1-pro-preview, gpt-5.6-terra
Questions people ask
Which is better for workflow automation: DeepSeek V4 Pro or Grok 4.5?
Grok 4.5 — it scored 86/100 against 81/100 on our 12-task workflow automation suite, winning 6 tasks to 1 with 5 tied. Every answer was marked blind by three judges from three rival AI labs.
How was this tested?
Both models answered the identical published workflow automation tasks. Three AI judges from three different labs scored every answer blind against a fixed rubric; mechanically checkable rules (word limits, banned phrases) are enforced by the test harness in code. The raw outputs and judge verdicts are downloadable.
More workflow automation head-to-heads: GPT-5.6 Sol vs Grok 4.5 · DeepSeek V4 Pro vs GPT-5.6 Sol · Claude Sonnet 5 vs Grok 4.5 · Claude Sonnet 5 vs DeepSeek V4 Pro · GPT-5.5 vs Grok 4.5 · DeepSeek V4 Pro vs GPT-5.5
Full ranking: Best AI for workflow automation · model pages: DeepSeek V4 Pro, Grok 4.5