What is Agentic AI?
Agentic AI transforms industries with autonomy, proactivity, and decision-making capabilities. Read more to learn its definition, examples, and implications for the future of work.
Agentic AI is a term used to describe artificial intelligence (AI) systems that can autonomously perform actions with little human intervention. It’s a term that was introduced by Andrew Ng in June 2024.
How is agentic AI different from AI?
Traditional AI follows predefined rules, while agentic AI can operate independently, learning from experiences and adjusting future actions based on new information. Agentic AI is also able to be proactive, anticipating needs and taking the initiative to achieve goals. Traditional AI simply responds to user inputs.
What are the implications of agentic AI for the workforce and employees?
The workforce has already been dramatically impacted by the introduction of generative AI (genAI) tools like ChatGPT and Visier’s Vee. Agentic AI is poised to have an even more significant—and disruptive—impact on the workplace and a wide range of jobs and roles.
HR and other employees will need to develop new skills to work with agentic AI tools. Organizations will need to consider how various tasks and decisions could be automated through agentic AI.
What is an example of agentic AI?
UiPath, a technology firm, offers some examples of agentic AI and how it is already being used in organizations:
In insurance companies, agentic AI could be used to assess the validity of claims, gather information from a range of sources, and communicate with customers about the progress of their claim.
In supply chain management, agentic AI can be used to analyze massive amounts of data instantaneously and in real time to help better manage inventory and remove bottlenecks.
In healthcare, agentic AI can be used to accelerate drug discovery and predict the efficacy of new drugs—speeding up time to market and reducing costs.
That’s just the tip of the iceberg as companies across all industries begin to experiment with the potential of agentic AI.
What role does agentic AI play in people analytics?
Agentic AI also has an important role to play in people analytics. For instance, without the need for extensive human prompts, agentic AI tools could be used to forecast future HR- and people-related risks and opportunities, provide more personalized training and career development opportunities for employees, and analyze vast amounts of people-related data to provide increasingly sophisticated insights for organizations and their HR leaders and managers.
