Definition
Agentic AI describes systems built around a language model that decides what to do next: it breaks a goal into steps, calls tools or other systems, reads what comes back, and adjusts until the task is done or it needs a person. A chatbot answers; an agentic system acts.
Anthropic draws a useful line between workflows, where the steps are fixed in code and the model fills them in, and agents, where the model itself directs the process and chooses its tools. Most production systems mix the two, keeping the agentic part to the steps that genuinely need judgement.
The term is now also a marketing label. Gartner expects more than 40% of agentic AI projects to be cancelled by the end of 2027, and warns that many products sold as agentic are existing assistants or automations relabelled.