There is a lot of buzz around agentic AI and AI agents. While the terms are used interchangeably, they are not the same. Here, we explain the difference.
There are a lot of new terms dominating the artificial intelligence world lately, "Agentic AI" and "AI agents" being two of them. Oftentimes, they're being used interchangeably, but the two phrases have their own distinct meanings. In this blog, we explore agentic AI vs AI agents, what makes them different, and how they will change the way we work.
In case you're not caught up on our blog, let's start with what Agentic AI is. Agentic AI is autonomous — it makes independent decisions and takes action based on the goal it's built around. Rather than being an AI tool controlled by human input, like Generative AI, Natural Language Processing (NLP), or AI Agents (which we'll get to in a moment), it actually uses those tools to execute complex tasks. This limits the need for human intervention, as it can adapt to all manner of external stimuli.
AI Agents have an extremely narrow scope when it comes to the tasks they perform. They're purpose-built for repetitive tasks and can only respond to a certain type of stimuli. They can only function in a controlled environment with specific guidelines and boundaries, and they often react to human input or a particular type of action. AI agents are particularly useful for automating simple tasks, but they require human supervision to ensure their output is correct. These are the main differences when it comes to agentic AI vs AI agents.
While Agentic AI is still in its early stages, there are several real-world applications that we can encounter today.
Autonomous vehicles are a great example because they can also be an easily understood comparison for other types of AI. While they're not globally accessible, Level 5, fully autonomous cars are a reality with companies like Waymo currently operating in certain areas of Phoenix, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. Waymos have no one sitting in the front seat — they're a taxi that can be ordered like an Uber or Lyft, and the car takes its passengers to their destination. By being covered in sensors, the car is in tune with the external environment, making informed decisions about changing lanes, avoiding obstacles, and driving safely in real time.
Supply chain is another area where Agentic AI is making a significant impact. It's able to supervise inventory, order more before running out of stock, predict demand, organize warehouses, and more. Amazon Robotics has paid special attention to ensuring the safety of the human workers in their new warehouses. Proteus is their first, fully autonomous mobile robot, and it operates at their fulfillment centers, moving carts of packages to the correct loading dock. What sets Proteus apart from robots that came before is that it doesn't need to stay confined to a certain area or follow a pre-determined route of guide stickers on the floor. The Proteus robots are loaded with a virtual map of the warehouse, which it uses to find loading docks, packages, and unoccupied charging stations when batteries are low. They also sense people around them and can swerve around obstacles, making warehouses safer for people to work alongside robots.
AI agents that rely on user input are more accessible to the average person, and they're embedded in many of the tools we use in our daily work and personal lives.
The category of productivity tools covers a wide variety of software. One of the most common is ChatGPT, which might not initially come to mind when listing productivity tools, but it's perfect for summarizing, brainstorming, rewording, and more. Don't have time to read a thousand-word article? Ask for a summary. Trying to answer a tricky email? Get a few different ways to word it. While it's still not the best for faultless content creation, it has many uses. You can ask for recipes based on your pantry, simplify a complicated topic, have it produce 20 different titles to help find the best one, and more.
There are tools that perform specific productivity tasks, like GitHub's Copilot, which creates tests, answers questions, troubleshoots bugs, and even suggests code completions. Others take meeting notes for you, like a new feature offering from Google's Gemini that takes meeting notes in a document for you, letting you focus on the meeting instead of the typing. There are also all-encompassing tools like goblin.tools that has a to-do list breakdown, formalize, judge, professor, consultant, etc, and Notion AI, which supports Q&A, an insight generator, prompt generator, organizer, analyzer, and other functions. These powerful tools are multi-agent systems that have one agent for a specific task built around pre-defined rules to ensure the output is confined to what you're looking for. For instance, if you use goblin.tools' Chef capability, it will only have a data set of recipes to pull from and won't be able to hallucinate an answer about changing a tire.
Agent-based chatbots are extremely helpful for customer service — they can not only weed out FAQs, but there are also purpose-built chatbots for issuing refunds. Chatbots like these not only improve customer experience, but they free human agents up from repetitive tasks to work on more complex issues.
Chatbots like Zapier Chatbots enhance customer experience by enabling them to ask common questions, schedule calls with a representative, and even get answers about their account or orders.
You may be wondering where digital assistants like Siri or Alexa fall on this scale. Well, some of the capabilities can be considered agent-based, as they rely on user prompts to function, but the "autonomous" aspect of them is highly debatable. The Google Assistant allows you to set reminders, make calendar events, adjust your home lighting, ask searchable questions, and, most recently, order food from Just Eat with just your voice (though I personally can't get that to work beyond simply opening the Just Eat app on my phone). However, if you've ever asked one of these assistants for help, you know they're still far from intelligent automation. Digital assistants that ran off Agentic AI would be able to do much more without a human user prompting it for every little thing. Assistants of the not-so-distant future will be able to respond to "order my favorite Chinese food and have it here for 6pm tonight" or "don't show me news notifications about politics" accurately. Today, we can't even ask our Amazon Alexa to stop giving us shipping notifications — you have to do that yourself. But with the rapid pace at which artificial agents are developing, this isn't a sci-fi idea or something that can only be found in the distant future. Agentic AI assistants could be a huge part of our personal and professional lives within the next two or three years.
Now we have covered agentic AI vs AI agents and their differences. What do these AI technologies mean for the future?
Having a personalized bot that we bring to our jobs is a looming reality. With machine learning, Predictive AI, generative AI, and additional agents all working under the umbrella of AI, We could all have our own assistants that know our writing style, our communication preferences, and our personalities to not only make tailored suggestions but work towards complex goals like answering emails for us or automatically scheduling an eye exam when we're due for one. As AI develops, it will become harder to separate the future of work from the future of daily routines. Imagine Agentic AI that suggests a list of tasks for you to do at work each morning based on how much energy you have, which is concluded from what time you got out of bed, whether you ate breakfast, how fast you walked during your commute, and a million other data points that can be gathered between the time you wake up and the time you sit down at your desk.
While we're still years out from AI that runs like that, there are still very real applications of Agentic AI that will become widely available this calendar year. At Virtuoso QA, we have agent-based features in our application that help streamline your test authoring and automate repetitive tasks. If you're interested in being at the forefront of Agentic AI usage, you can book a demo today.
