Your Next Teammate Isn’t Human: Agentic AI Explained

A couple of months ago I went to the Gartner conference 2025 in Orlando. One of my favorite things to do at any conference is to take half a day and talk to a myriad of vendors. In my time doing this all any of them spoke about (and I do mean all) is Agentic Systems. Every product is putting in some type of Agentic systems and for that alone you should care.

I was surprised at the who's who representation of vendors. Name the vendor and they were there. If this is what they are talking about at the end of 2025 then by 2027 this is going to be a tidal wave product features that we cannot avoid. We must be educated and understand how this affects us, the work we do and our customers.

#1 Understand what is an Agentic AI agent

Agentic AI is a type of AI that can take action and make decisions on its own to achieve a goal, acting like a proactive digital teammate rather than just a tool that responds to questions. This technology will transform operations by moving AI systems away from static behavior and strong human supervision toward adaptable, autonomous action involving choices between possibilities in the task flows.

#2 How is it different than today's GenAI Products

Today's current GenAI products like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity, mostly wait for you to tell them exactly what to do next.

A good example of the differences is in a simple example of: "Plan the Office holiday Party".

ChatGPT is the YouTube influencer with the annoying banner of "this changes everything." ChatGPT would give you options, tell you how to write the email invitations, give you step by step project breakdown, and even give you a itemized list of food/gifts folks should bring.

Agentic AI is the entity that gets it done. Harkening back to the Home Depot tagline. It would do the following:

1. Proactive: It takes the initiative. You tell it the end goal, and it works to achieve it independently.

2. Goal-Oriented Action: It breaks a big goal into smaller steps, decides the best way to do them, and uses different tools (like a web browser, email, or other software) to complete the tasks. The final product is the completed goal, not just a piece of content.

3. Adapts and Learns: If something goes wrong (e.g., a website is down), it can try a different way to solve the problem and learn from the experience, so it gets smarter over time.

#3 Why this matters

As systems implement Agentic AI we must recognize it and not bury our heads in the sand. Think of Agentic AI as an employee doing work for you. These systems may be making face-based decisions as speed, scale, and consistency.

Therefore, there must be clear guardrails ensuring every action aligns with defined policies and truth in the data. The results must be auditable. This introduces a complex level of security and governance. Hence why firms of any size must have a solid AI Governance framework. This comprises of (but not limited to):

• Compounded Risk: The orchestration and interaction between multiple agents create compounded risk. If one agent fails or is compromised, the failure can rapidly multiply across the system.

• Security Foundation: Operating agents in production necessitates a strong foundation, including secure code execution, memory/learning capabilities, and robust identity and access controls for all agents.

• Controlling the Ecosystem: Governance must manage emerging issues such as conduct, coordination, and collusion within collaborative agent ecosystems. This requires an adaptive governance framework that scales control based on an agent’s risk and complexity.

Ultimately, the deployment of Agentic AI is foundational to augmenting your workforce and increasing scale and workload. You are responsible for this. Today you can prepare for Agentic AI by understanding the roles in your organization along with appropriate guardrails. Preparing the proper security practices and implementing those. Finally understanding the proper questions to ask vendors around identity and access control for any agent they introduce.