What does ‘agentic’ AI mean? Tech’s newest buzzword is a mix of marketing fluff and real promise

What makes an artificial intelligence product “agentic” depends on who’s selling it. But the promise is usually that it’s a step beyond today’s generative AI chatbots.

Chatbots, however useful, are all talk and no action. They can answer questions, retrieve and summarize information, write papers and generate images, music, video and lines of code. AI agents, by contrast, are…