Agentic AI: What It Is and Why Boards Should Care

In 2024, generative artificial intelligence (AI) was all the rage. In 2025, agentic AI has surfaced as the next frontier of AI deployment. What is agentic AI, and why is it important for directors to understand how management intends to use it?

Generative AI is capable of creating new and novel content (such as text and images) in response to prompts or requests. Generative AI models have rapidly evolved in the last three years, progressing from text-only models with limited reasoning abilities to multimodal models with advanced step-by-step reasoning and research capabilities. These advancements are key to unlocking the next era of AI evolution, known as agentic AI.

“Agentic AI” describes an AI system that employs a large language model (LLM), as well as other technologies, as part of its ecosystem to enable autonomous task planning and support reasoning to achieve human-defined objectives. Operating autonomously without continuous human intervention, agentic AI gathers and evaluates data to determine the best course of action and acts to accomplish its stated objective. Unlike generative AI, which produces content for further action, agentic AI systems leverage an LLM to enable autonomous AI agents to process and interpret large volumes of data, create a plan and produce outputs aligned to their assigned goals.