Agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that can act autonomously to accomplish goals, rather than just responding to single prompts. Unlike traditional AI that waits for your instruction and gives you one answer, agentic AI can break down complex tasks, make decisions, use tools, and take multiple steps on its own to achieve an objective.

Agentic AI has a number of key characteristics that differentiate it from Generative AI. These are:

Goal-oriented behavior: You give it a high-level goal (like "research competitors in my industry and create a report"), and it figures out the steps needed to accomplish it.
Tool use: Agentic AI can access and use various tools—searching the web, running code, reading files, calling APIs, or interacting with software applications—choosing which tools to use based on what the task requires.
Multi-step reasoning: Instead of providing a single response, it can plan a sequence of actions, execute them, evaluate the results, and adjust its approach if needed.
Decision-making: It makes choices about how to proceed without requiring human input at every step, though it typically operates within boundaries you set.

Looking at this via an example -

Traditional AI interaction:

You: "What's the weather in Brisbane?"AI: "I'll need to search for that..." [provides answer]

Agentic AI interaction:

You: "Plan a three-day trip to Tokyo for next month"AI: [Searches current weather patterns] → [Checks flight prices] → [Researches hotels] → [Identifies top attractions] → [Creates itinerary] → [Generates budget breakdown] → Presents complete trip plan

Agentic AI is being integrated into Operating Systems, Applications and back-fitted into web applications such as accounting systems, booking platforms and business tools. Agentic AI is being used for coding assistants that can debug and write entire features, research tools that gather and synthesize information from multiple sources, business automation that handles multi-step workflows, and personal assistants that can manage complex scheduling or planning tasks.

The key distinction is autonomy—agentic AI doesn't just answer questions; it actively works toward completing objectives you define.

Lesson 2 – What is Agentic AI