I learned a new word recently – “agentic.” It came up during the launch of Salesforce’s new “Agent Force” platform Dreamforce 2024, which experts referred to as an example of “agentic AI.”
When I tried to look up “agentic” in the dictionary, though, I found nothing.
Words have to be fairly common to make it into Merriam-Webster. “Agentic” isn’t there yet, but if you’re reading or learning about AI, you’ll probably come across it, so I thought I would share the definition here.
To say that something is “agentic” means it has agency – the ability to reason, make decisions, and take action based on those decisions.
Agentic AI goes beyond generating information to reason about the meaning of that information, draw conclusions from it, and take steps to change the environment without human help. Companies are using it for a whole host of things, including customer service requests, data cleanup, and even software development. An August 2024 article in CIO Magazine said that “10% of organizations already use AI agents, more than half plan to use them in the next year, and 82% plan to integrate them within the next three years.”
If that adoption rate pans out, “agentic AI” will join its sister term, “generative AI,” in the dictionary very soon.
CIO Magazine Article: https://www.cio.com/article/3489045/ai-agents-will-transform-business-processes-and-magnify-risks.html
Curious how words make it into the dictionary? Check out this infographic: https://www.merriam-webster.com/wordplay/how-a-word-gets-in-the-dictionary-infographic
