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Agentic AI has emerged as the software industry’s latest shiny thing. Beyond smarter chatbots, AI agents operate with increasing autonomy, making them poised to drive efficiency gains across enterprises. “Agentic refers to AI systems that can take actions on behalf of users, not just generate text or answer questions,” says Andrew McNamara, director of applied machine learning at Shopify. Agentic systems run continuously until a task is complete, he adds, citing Shopify’s Sidekick, a proactive agent for merchants. Development of agentic AI now spans many business domains. According to Anthropic, a provider of large language models (LLMs), AI agents are most commonly deployed in software engineering, accounting for roughly half of use cases, followed by back-office automation, marketing, sales, finance, and data analysis.