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What "Agentic" Actually Means, Cutting Through The Buzzword
By Nigel Guy · 2 min read
"Agentic" has become one of those words that gets attached to almost
anything with a chat interface, to the point where it's stopped reliably
telling you what a product actually does. That's a shame, because underneath
the marketing, it points at a real and useful distinction.
The rule: "agentic" means a system takes a sequence of actions toward a
goal with some autonomy, deciding its own next step — if a product can't
tell you what it decides on its own versus what it just responds to, the
label is doing marketing work, not descriptive work.
The mechanism for cutting through it
- Ask what happens between your request and the final result. A single
response to a single prompt isn't agentic, regardless of how it's
marketed. Multiple self-directed steps, chosen based on what's found
along the way, is the actual behaviour the word describes.
- Ask what it decides versus what you decide. True agentic behaviour
means it's choosing the next action, not just executing a step you
specified.
- Ask what oversight exists between steps. This is the practical
question that matters more than the label — see "Building An Agent That
Reports Instead Of Acting" and "The One Question To Ask Before Giving Any
Agent Write Access" for what to actually do with the answer.
- Treat the word as a starting question, not a conclusion. "It's
agentic" tells you to ask more questions about autonomy and oversight; it
doesn't tell you the product is good, safe, or right for your use case.
What to skip
Skip being impressed by the word itself in marketing copy — ask for the
concrete behaviour behind it instead. Skip dismissing something as "just
marketing hype" without checking whether there's real autonomous behaviour
underneath the label; sometimes there genuinely is.
Guardrails
- More autonomy isn't automatically better — it's a trade-off against
oversight and predictability, appropriate for some tasks and not others.
- The precise boundary of what counts as "agentic" is genuinely debated
even among people building these systems — treat the term as pointing at
a spectrum, not a strict binary.
- Whatever the label, the actual risk questions are the same ones that
apply to any agent: what can it do without you, and what's the cost if
it does the wrong thing once.
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