Charles Lyons-Burt
As it’s currently used and understood, artificial intelligence requires a great deal of human input, guidance and interaction. The most proliferous and widespread use of AI for the general public are chatbots like OpenAI’s ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini, which answer questions and develop content based on inputted prompts. But what if AI could do more than just spit back at users a paragraph or three of text cobbled together from various sources on the internet? What if AI acted more like an autonomous system of its own, able to take gathered information and make informed decisions that greatly expedite productive tasks?
That’s where agentic AI comes in.
What Is Agentic AI?
“You can define agentic AI with one word: proactiveness,” AI subject matter expert Enver Cetin told Harvard Business Review.
Agentic AI is a mission-driven AI technology that is able to perform multi-step actions in order to complete an overall goal, like making a travel plan or organizing data for a business purpose. It can siphon information from one place, use it in another space or application and then compile its findings.
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How It Compares to Other Types of AI
Even though it’s the newest, shiniest form of AI, Agentic AI isn’t a replacement for or equivalent to chatbots or AI copilots. Rather, it works collaboratively with them to do different things. A copilot — not to be confused with Microsoft’s generative AI offering called Copilot — is a kind of centralized hub for AI activities, a “home screen,” according to Yahoo Finance. One navigates this hub in order to ask the chatbot questions. It will, in turn, link up with an AI agent, which will work to carry out your bidding.
Potential Uses of Agentic AI
These are some missions experts have identified as likely good uses for AI agents:
- Maximizing sales, customer satisfaction scores, or efficiency in supply-chain processes
- Completing and managing expense reports
- Identifying business opportunities
- Scheduling meetings with clients
- Booking travel and laying out itineraries
- And much more!
Benefits of Agentic AI
Agentic AI is said to possess three primary benefits that distinguish it from other types of AI: enhanced specialization, more reliability and a potential to innovate. The reliability is especially interesting, as a primary issue many generative AI systems have had are hallucinations, or wrong answers and content based on faulty conclusions and determinations. According to Harvard Business Review, agentic AI is freed from these pitfalls due to “greater cognitive reasoning.”
“Agentic AI systems also have significantly greater ability to sift and differentiate information sources for quality and reliability, increasing the degree of trust in their decisions,” the publication said.
AI Agents in Development
All of the major tech companies are betting big on agentic AI in 2025. Google unveiled its Project Mariner experimental prototype in December, which is able to traverse the internet and execute a series of tasks in Google Chrome.
Apple, too, has an agent coming very soon, which it advertises as linking up with Siri (in this case, the chatbot) to deliver information like when to pick up a partner from the airport. This means the agent looks in the email application for flight info, assesses traffic conditions and delivers an informed answer.
Nvidia, Microsoft and Salesforce are also all circling the ascendent tool.
To learn more about how AI is being used in the GovCon realm specifically, participate in the Potomac Officers Club’s highly anticipated 2025 AI Summit!
