What is agentic AI ?

Introduction

Agentic AI is AI with agency. Which means instead of simply asking a specific problem to be solved, an AI system is given a broad goal and asked to solve it. For example “organize a birthday party”. The AI is supposed to use its own agency to get things done. As AI becomes better, we have reached a point where agentic AI has become a theoretical possibility and with some constraints a practical reality.

In this post we will give you more detailed overview of what agentic AI is and what to expect in coming few months.

What makes an AI agentic ?

For an AI to be agentic it needs to have following characteristics.

• Autonomy

• Goal-oriented

• Adaptability

• Decision-making

Agentic system should be autonomous in a sense it should without a human constantly making decisions for it. Occasional human permission should be fine but the agent itself should work totally on its own,

Agentic system should always work towards a specific goal and not exist in vacuum. For example, one goal could be to “buy these sneakers when they are the cheapest”.

Adaptability refers to human like ability to react to unexpected changes in environment. It should not just fail but should rather look for alternatives.

Self driving cars is a great example of agentic system

Google’s fully self driving Waymo cars are a great example of a complex but very real agentic ai system. They can drive from point A to B very reliably without any input from a human and adapt to changing road conditions.

Dangers of Agentic AI

There are dangers associated with autonomous AI systems. As like all AI systems they can make mistakes, not realize it is a mistake and double down on the mistake. For example, an agent asked to book a good flight deal might book it multiple times wasting lot of money. Also, the agent might get tricked by bad actors into giving away credit card numbers. This is why agentic AI needs rigorous testing and good constraints to guard against such failures.

Some upcoming AI Agents

Salesforce and others are teaming together to create virtual employees that can take over a lot of work from real humans from sales, customer service to after sales support. A lot of this work is open ended and yet somewhat constrained.

Many banks are looking at replacing their customer support and real bank staff with AI agents. Bloomberg reported that the banking sector might look at 200K jobs replaced by AI agents pretty soon.