In plain English
Agentic AI describes AI that acts more like a capable assistant than a question-answering tool. It can work through a whole task, deciding what to do next on its own.
In practice
Agentic AI shifts the governance question from "is the answer right?" to "should this action happen?". Organisations need clear rules on what agents may do alone, who is accountable, how actions are logged, and when a human must approve.
Under the hood
Agentic systems combine planning, tool use, memory and often multiple cooperating agents, with orchestration frameworks managing state and hand-offs. Reliability tends to fall as tasks get longer, so production designs constrain autonomy with deterministic workflows, checkpoints and permission scopes.
Example
"Our agentic AI pilot handles password resets end to end."