Who's in charge of agentic AI?

While AI autonomy creates immense opportunity for efficiency and the best outcomes, risks around control and accountability can't be ignored

- ANIL NAIR

FOR MANY CLUED-IN on technology directions, Gartner's top strategic technology trends are a signpost. Not surprisingly, the very first trend they talk about for 2025 is agentic artificial intelligence (AI). In their words, "Agentic AI has the potential to perform as a highly competent teammate by providing insights from derivative events that are often not visible to human teammates."

To elaborate, with the ubiquitous use of generative AI, the first level was singular querying, wherein natural language processing (NLP) is used for replies. Now, we are seeing the shift to the next level — of solving more complex problems autonomously. And this, aka agentic AI, involves deep, iterative reasoning and multiple steps.

For instance, a major Indian bank has announced its intent to use agentic AI for customer service automation. The system, going beyond straightforward question answering, could potentially check the outstanding balance and recommend which accounts to pay off, and then complete transactions based on the client's response. Or it could be relating to autonomous fraud detection, triggered by an unusual login or non-typical behaviours, resulting in an instant customer alert, or quick remediation like freezing the account. This could involve behavioural biometrics and predictive forecasts leveraging financial crime databases.