Agentic AI is more like a smart helper that can solve problems on its own. It doesn’t need step-by-step guidance and can make decisions independently, setting smaller goals along the way to achieve a bigger objective. For example; self-driving cars and autonomous delivery drones.

AI agents, on the other hand, are designed to do specific tasks based on given instructions. They follow a set path and rely on what you tell them to do. Examples include customer service chatbots or email spam filters.

In short:

• AI agent = does one job you tell it to do
• Agentic AI = figures out all the tasks needed to reach your goal and handles changes along the way.