Spend enough time talking to tech executives and you might come away thinking generative artificial intelligence — the technology behind ChatGPT and other services that can create text, video and images — is about to upend every aspect of our lives. A.I. co-pilots, assistants and agents promise to boost productivity with helpful suggestions and shortcuts. Today, A.I. tools can do simple, specific tasks like craft emails, make presentations or write code, but soon, tech executives say, they will usher us into a sort of efficiency nirvana, where digital assistants anticipate and deliver our every need before we have to ask. One problem: Tech’s hype machine moves faster than anyone can actually build the tech. The technologists are not waiting for it to catch up to its promises — they’re already on to the next thing. And what comes after A.I. agents? Agentic A.I. It is a fancified way to say something acts like an agent. Unlike chatbots, which require a human to type in a prompt before it can spit out a response, agentic A.I. can act on its own. A customer could create a complex goal, like predicting which factory machines will need maintenance or booking a trip, and the A.I. would automatically complete the required tasks.
Or at least, that’s the idea. Most agentic A.I. is still in the “possibility” stage. And that means it’s a great time for tech companies to promote the heck out of it. Agentic A.I. “heralds a transformative era,” a start-up called Humans.AI declared on its blog. “We now live in an agentic economy,” the chief executive of Humanic AI, a different start-up, wrote on LinkedIn. Snowflake, a provider of cloud computing services, recently released an agentic product that it says will let customers “talk to their data.” Start-ups are even naming themselves after the idea. Agentic.ai, founded in 2021, makes technology that can play video games for testing or to play alongside humans. Agentic Labs, founded last year, makes software for building software. Agentic Systems, founded this year, is operating in secret.
Full opinion : So-called agentic artificial intelligence doesn’t require a human to tell it what to do. At least, that’s the idea.
