AI agent glossary
Agentic AI
AI systems that pursue goals by planning and taking actions with tools over multiple steps, rather than just answering a single prompt.
Agentic AI is a broad label for software where a model does more than generate text. It decides what to do next, uses tools to act on the world, looks at the results, and keeps going until a goal is met.
The word describes a spectrum, not a switch. A chatbot that can search the web is slightly agentic. A coding agent that edits files, runs tests, and opens a pull request on its own is very agentic. The more decisions the system makes without a human in between, the more agentic it is.
More autonomy brings more usefulness and more risk. Agentic systems need clear goals, good tools, limits on what they can touch, and ways to check their work.
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