According to the AI overlords, this is the year of agentic AI.
You may have seen Google announce its “agentic era” with a web browsing research assistant and an AI bot that calls nail salons and mechanics for you. OpenAI leadership talked about agentic AI being a “big theme in 2025” and has already introduced a research preview of Operator, an agent that can perform tasks on your behalf, and Deep Research, which “conducts multi-step research on the internet for complex tasks.” Microsoft just unveiled Microsoft Discover, an enterprise agentic AI tool for scientists. And your next smartphone could have agentic features that can send custom messages, create calendar events, or pull together information from across different apps.
If you’ve been nodding and smiling every time one of your tech friends mentions agentic AI, don’t be embarrassed. This is a new entry in the AI glossary, but one that can no longer be ignored.
So what exactly is agentic AI?
“Agentic AI refers to a class of artificial intelligence systems designed to operate autonomously, perceive their environment, set goals, plan actions to achieve those goals, and execute those plans without continuous human intervention. These systems can learn and adapt over time based on feedback and new information.”
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