In the AI industry, ‘agentic’ takes on a life of its own | CNN

Earlier this year, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt offered some advice on how to get rich. “If you really want to make money, it’s actually easy,” he said during a panel at the annual World Economic Forum meeting in Davos, Switzerland. “Found an agentic AI company.” When tech leaders prophesy that AI will replace a vast swath of the workforce, “agentic” AI is the big thing they’re talking about. Instead of merely automating a task — producing an illustration, say, after being told what to draw — agentic AI, or an “AI agent,” automates an entire process, with minimal intervention by the user. An agent can, in theory, be dispatched to code a complete software program, or to plan and book a vacation, or to generate a job listing and select among the people who answer it, without being directed to take each step in the process. To hear CEOs, investors and the LinkedIn crowd tell it, “agentic” AI is the here, the now and the future. “My sense is that it’s a word that’s useful to describe software that acts a bit more like a person does,” says John Horton, an economist and associate professor at MIT Sloan. EDITOR’S NOTE: CNN’s “Word of the Weekâ€