Artificial Intelligence

What is Agentic AI?

Quick answer

AI systems designed to pursue goals with some autonomy, planning steps, using tools, and acting on results rather than only answering prompts.

Agentic AI, explained

Agentic AI describes a style of system rather than a single product. Instead of producing one response and stopping, an agentic system breaks a goal into steps, calls tools such as search, databases, or business applications, checks what happened, and decides what to do next. AI agents are the individual programs that work this way.

A simple example is an accounts team that asks an agentic workflow to reconcile invoices. The system reads new invoices, matches them against purchase orders, flags mismatches, and drafts emails to suppliers, leaving approvals to a person. Agentic AI can save time on repetitive, multi-step work, but it introduces new risks: errors can compound across steps, and broad permissions increase the damage a mistake can cause. Clear scopes, logging, and human checkpoints are standard safeguards.

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