Agentic AI: The next giant leap in the future of work

A great deal has been discussed about AI over the last three years. For people who have been closely following the developments, like me, the information now available has been overwhelming. Then here comes the new offspring that has gotten the interest of many organizations: Agentic AI (some refer to it as AI Agents)

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The trajectory of artificial intelligence has brought us to a pivotal moment—one where AI agents are no longer just tools but collaborative digital teammates. This new breed, known as Agentic AI, represents a profound shift in how work is defined, distributed, and done. It's not just evolution—it's a revolution. We are witnessing the transformation of AI from a sophisticated tool into a powerful partner in problem-solving and innovation. It's a shift that makes the current Gen AI systems look like basic calculators.

At the beginning of the democratization of AI, it was all about Generative AI; its power and usability. Many of us have now made platforms like ChatGPT, Microsoft Co-Pilot, Perplexity, and Gemini common assistants in various workstreams. So what makes Agentic AI different?

Unlike Gen AI, which only responds when commanded based on patterns in its training data, Agentic AI is proactive and can think, plan, collaborate, and act independently towards goals. Gen AI is used to generate text, images, code, audio, and videos. In each step, a human creator reviews the generated content, refining it and directing the entire process (curating it). Agentic AI, on the other hand, has a life cycle. It can perceive its environment, decide on the actions to take, execute those actions, learn from the output, and then repeat the process, all with minimal human intervention. How does it do it? It also utilizes Gen AI by crafting its own prompts (internal dialogues) through chain-of-thought reasoning.