People keep talking about ‘agentic’ AI — here’s what that means

Big Tech is working on agentic AI, or AI agents capable of autonomously taking action on behalf of human users to complete multi-step tasks. 

Generative AI has been the talk of tech for a while now, but tune into your favorite business podcast and you’ll probably hear a different phrase tossed around: “agentic” AI.

So what’s the difference?

The two are closely related. You couldn’t have agentic AI without generative AI. Definitions vary, but in general, agentic AI refers to AI technology that’s capable of performing agent-like behavior that can autonomously accomplish complex tasks on your behalf.

Companies working on AI agents say they are intended to one day be digital coworkers or assistants to human workers in fields spanning from healthcare and supply chain management to cybersecurity and customer service.

Here’s how some Big Tech companies explain the concept:

• Nvidia’s definition says agentic AI “uses sophisticated reasoning and iterative planning to autonomously solve complex, multi-step problems.”
• IBM says agentic AI is a system or program with “agency” that can “make decisions, take actions, solve complex problems and interact with external environments beyond the data upon which the system’s machine learning (ML) models were trained.”
• Microsoft says AI agents “range from simple chatbots, to copilots, to advanced AI assistants in the form of digital or robotic systems that can run complex workflows autonomously.”

Some leaders in the field say agents are ushering in a new frontier in AI.

“In just a few years, we’ve already witnessed three generations of A.I.,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff told The New York Times earlier this month. “First came predictive models that analyze data. Next came generative A.I., driven by deep-learning models like ChatGPT. Now, we are experiencing a third wave — one defined by intelligent agents that can autonomously handle complex tasks.”

Salesforce, which launched its Agentforce suite earlier this year, has said it plans to have more than 1 billion AI agents in use for companies by the end of next year.

Google CEO Sundar Pichai recently said the company has been “investing in developing more agentic models” over the last year. (He defined agentic AI as being able to “understand more about the world around you, think multiple steps ahead, and take action on your behalf, with your supervision.”) The company made agentic AI a major focus of its Gemini 2.0 launch this month.

OpenAI plans to launch an AI agent code-named “Operator” in January that would be able to use a computer on a person’s behalf to do things like write code or book flights, Bloomberg reported last month, citing two people familiar with the matter.

The company previewed its latest AI model, o3, on Friday as the final announcement of its 12 days of “Shipmas” campaign.