How AI agents and agentic AI differ from each other

The two related technologies can work together, but CIOs should understand the difference to protect against vendor hype and obfuscation.

With agentic AI in its infancy and organizations rushing to adopt AI agents, there seems to be confusion about the difference between the two technologies.

Many people have used the terms “agentic AI” and “AI agents” interchangeably, but experts say there’s growing understanding that the two are separate, but related, tools. CIOs should understand the difference to ensure they’re using the right tool for the job, experts say.

AI practitioners are beginning to define the two technologies this way: AI agents are tools tasked with a specific function within an organization’s IT systems, with predictable outcomes as the goal.

Agents have a narrow scope and generally have a limited ability to learn new information.

Meanwhile, the still nascent agentic AI is an umbrella technology that can use agents and other AI tools to create fully autonomous systems that can set their own goals, learn over time, and reason across tasks, they say.

Some companies are starting to deploy early-stage prototypes of agentic AI, but a truly autonomous system has long-term persistent memory and other capabilities that aren’t available yet, says Numa Dhamani, head of machine learning at mobile security provider iVerify.

“Agentic AIs have the ability to set or reprioritize their goals, and they’re able to kind of dynamically reason through different kinds of domains,” she says. “They can do things like self-reflection or improvement loops, and they’re also starting to make decisions about which tasks to perform, and how they would sequence those tasks.”

CIOs can think of agents as individual players or employees while agentic AI is the larger team, says Jim Olsen, CTO at software governance provider ModelOp. “Each member of the team brings both abilities, or tools, and expertise, or training, to an overall task, while agentic AI is the whole team working together to solve the problem,” he adds.

Thursday, 12 June 2025