Agentic AI

Agentic AI describes systems built around models that can act: they break a goal into steps, call tools, read the results, and decide what to do next with limited human direction. The shift from a single question-and-answer exchange to an autonomous loop is what separates an agent from a chatbot, and it is where much of the current frontier of applied AI sits.

Autonomy is exactly what makes agentic AI a governance problem. One instruction can fan out into many tool calls and data reads that no human reviewed, so the question moves from 'what did the model say' to 'what is the agent allowed to do.' Governing agentic AI means binding each action to an identity and a scoped policy and adjudicating it at runtime, not just inspecting the opening prompt.