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Agentic AI

Definition

AI systems that autonomously plan and execute multi-step tasks across multiple tool calls — typically built on top of a large language model that orchestrates external interfaces, data sources and tools.

Noise — Signal

In vendor decks, agentic AI appears as "AI now takes over what employees previously had to do manually". In reality, the production systems of 2026 are tightly bounded workflows with defined tools, deterministic guardrails and clear escalation logic. Open-acting agents — the kind that pick the task, the tools and the order themselves — are practically not production-ready in regulated industries. What works looks less spectacular from the outside than the demo.

The right question

Not: "Where can we deploy agents?" But: "Which of our processes have tightly defined steps with auditable outputs — and which of those steps justify the additional cost of agent architecture, tracing and governance over a classic workflow automation?"

Related terms

Guardrails

Mechanisms before, during or after model inference that filter, restrict or escalate undesired inputs or outputs.

Prompt Injection

An attack technique in which inputs are crafted so that the model ignores or overrides its original system instructions.

Evaluation (Eval)

Systematic, reproducible measurement of an AI system's quality against defined criteria.

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

An architectural pattern in which a language model retrieves relevant documents from a knowledge base and integrates them as context in the prompt.

AI Red Teaming

Structured, adversarial testing of an AI system against security, bias, hallucination and misuse patterns.

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