According to the AI overlords, this is the year of agentic AI.
You may have seen Google announce its "agentic era" with a web browsing research assistant and an AI bot that calls nail salons and mechanics for you. OpenAI leadership talked about agentic AI being a "big theme in 2025" and has already introduced a research preview of Operator, an agent that can perform tasks on your behalf, and Deep Research, which "conducts multi-step research on the internet for complex tasks." Microsoft just unveiled Microsoft Discover, an enterprise agentic AI tool for scientists. And your next smartphone could have agentic features that can send custom messages, create calendar events, or pull together information from across different apps.
If you've been nodding and smiling every time one of your tech friends mentions agentic AI, don't be embarrassed. This is a new entry in the AI glossary, but one that can no longer be ignored.
So what exactly is agentic AI?
"Agentic AI refers to a class of artificial intelligence systems designed to operate autonomously, perceive their environment, set goals, plan actions to achieve those goals, and execute those plans without continuous human intervention. These systems can learn and adapt over time based on feedback and new information."
That's according to — what else? — Google's AI chatbot Gemini.
Unlike generative AI, which is essentially a tool for creating some kind of output — code, text, audio, images, videos — agentic AI can autonomously perform tasks on a user's behalf. This is a step up from the standard AI chatbot experience. Instead of generating a response based on its training material, agentic AI can take additional steps, such as conducting internet searches and analyzing the results, consulting additional sources, or completing a task in another app or software.
You may have heard this term used interchangeably with AI agents, but agentic AI is a broader term that encompasses technology that may not be fully autonomous but has some agent-like capabilities.
So, OpenAI considers Operator an AI agent because it has contextual awareness and can perform tasks for you like sending text messages. And its Deep Research tool is agentic AI because it can autonomously crawl the web and compile a report for the user, though its capabilities pretty much stop there for now.
Agentic AI is powered by more advanced reasoning models like ChatGPT o3 and Gemini 2.5 Pro Preview, which can break down complex tasks and make inferences. This brings large-language models like ChatGPT one step closer to mimicking how the human brain works. Unless you constantly retrain a generative AI model with new information, it can't learn new things, said Karen Panetta, IEEE Fellow and professor of engineering at Tufts University. "This other kind of AI can learn from seeing other examples, and it can be more autonomous in breaking down tasks and helping you with more goal-driven types of activities, versus more exploratory or giving back information."
When combined with computer vision, which is what allows a model to "see" a user's computer screen, we get the agentic AI everyone is so excited about.
Why is everyone talking about agentic AI?
Agentic AI is not entirely new. Self-driving cars and robot vacuums could both be considered early examples of agentic AI. They're technologies with autonomous properties that rely on advanced sensors and cameras to make sense of their environment and react accordingly.
But agentic AI is having its moment now for a few reasons. Crucially, the latest models have gotten better and more user-friendly (although sometimes too friendly). And as people begin to rely on AI chatbots like ChatGPT, there's a growing interest in using these tools to automate daily tasks like responding to emails. With agentic AI, you don't need to be a computer programmer to use ChatGPT for automation. You can simply tell the chatbot what to do in plain English and have it carry out your instructions. At least, that's the idea.
Companies like OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic are banking on agentic AI because it has the potential to move the technology beyond the novelty chatbot experience. With agentic AI, tools like ChatGPT could become truly indispensable for businesses and individuals alike. Agentic AI tools could order groceries online, browse and buy the best-reviewed espresso machine for you, or even research and book vacations. In fact, Google is already taking steps in this direction with its new AI shopping experience.
In the business world, companies are looking to agentic AI to resolve customer service inquiries and adjust stock trading strategies in real-time.
What could possibly go wrong?
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Are there risks involved with unleashing autonomous bots in the wild? Why, yes.
With an agent operating on your behalf, there's always a risk of it sending a sensitive email to the wrong person or accidentally making a huge purchase. And then there's the question of liability. "Am I going to be sued because I went and had my agent do something?" Panetta wondered. "Say I'm working as an officer of something, and I use an AI agent to make a decision, to help us do our planning, and then you lose that organization money."
The major AI players have put safeguards in place to prevent AI agents from going rogue, such as requiring human supervision or approval for sensitive tasks. OpenAI says Operator won't take screenshots when it's in human override mode, and it doesn't currently allow its agent to make banking transactions.
But what about when the technology becomes more commonplace? As we become more comfortable with agentic AI, will we become more passive and lax about oversight? Earlier in this article, we used Google Gemini to help define agentic AI. If we become dependent on AI tools for even simple learning, will human beings get dumber?
Then there's the extensive data access we have to give agents. Sure, it would be convenient for ChatGPT to automatically filter, sort, or even delete emails. But do you want to give an AI company full access to every email you've ever sent or received?
And what about bad actors that don't have such safeguards in place? Panetta warns of increasingly sophisticated cyberattacks utilizing agentic AI.
"Because the access to powerful computing now is so cheap, that means that the bad actors have access to it," she said. "They can be running simulations and being able to come up with sophisticated schemes to break into your systems or connive you into taking out this equity loan."
AI has always been a double-edged sword, with equally potent harms and benefits. And with agentic AI getting ready for primetime deployment, the stakes are getting higher.
Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.
