agentic
adj/eɪˈd͡ʒɛn.tɪk/ · /əˈd͡ʒɛn.tɪk/
Etymology From agent + -ic.
1
That behaves like an agent: able to express or expressing agency or control on one's own behalf or on the behalf of another.
- From the perspective of the previous chapter, to change from a patient to an agent is to adopt or elaborate an agentic plot that the person lives (Howard 1989).1994, Larry Cochran, Joan Laub, Becoming an Agent: Patterns and Dynamics for Shaping Your Life, page 31:
- The next section examines ways in which network and partnership management may be able to reconcile self-organization with agentic intervention.1998, Arie Halachmi, Peter B. Boorsma, Inter and Intra Government Arrangements for Productivity, page 39:
2
Computing, Engineering, Mathematics, Natural sciences, Physical sciences, Sciences Of a system Acting autonomously on behalf of a user; (now especially artificial intelligence) involving the use of agentic AI.
- Over the last decade, IoT-enabled objects have steadily progressed from being passive to becoming agentic—actively capturing and storing data, communicating information among objects or with users, and offering suggestions to users.2012 September 5, Haiyan Jia, Mu Wu, Eunhwa Jung, Alice Shapiro, S. Shyam Sundar, “Balancing Human Agency and Object Agency: An End-User Interview Study of the Internet of Things”, in Proceedings of the 2012 ACM Conference on Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp '12), New York: Association for Computing Machinery, →DOI, →ISBN, pages 1185–1188:
- Sometimes agentic systems detect and correct mistakes, but at other times, mistakes compound through multi-agent workflows and may give rise to computational cascades where errors, tool failures, or incomplete data can propagate undetected and enter the final output.2025 September 23, Anton Korinek, “AI Agents for Economic Research”, in NBER WB, number 34202, →DOI, page 6:
1 more example
- As technology advances, A.I.-created travel bots and influencers are likely to become agentic (a term that describes a system that can take an action on its own), said Ari Adnan Cibari, founder at the marketing and technology consultancy AtlasPerk. That could mean an A.I. influencer could, for example, help followers book travel arrangements or make dinner reservations.2025 December 9, Julie Weed, “These Travel Influencers Don’t Want Freebies. They’re A.I.”, in The New York Times, New York, N.Y.: The New York Times Company, →ISSN, →OCLC, archived from the original on 09 Dec 2025:
3
Human sciences, Psychology, Sciences Broadly That obeys authority (introduced in Milgram's theory).
Of a psychological state of a person
- Most individuals can be easily triggered to enter, and be comfortable in the agentic state.
- Milgram (1974) suggested that one factor contributing to the maintenance of obedience was that the individual in the obedience situation entered into an agentic state, which involves a person's giving up his or her normal moral and ethical standards in favor of those of the authority figure.2013, Kenneth S. Bordens, Irwin A. Horowitz, Social Psychology:
4
Human sciences, Psychology, Sciences Having to do with performance, or achieving status.
- If helping is a variation on the more general agentic theme of self-assertion and display, one might expect that power motivation would predict other forms of agentic striving in friendship experiences.1985, Steve Duck, Daniel Perlman, Understanding Personal Relationships, page 98:
5
Human sciences, Psychology, Sciences Having agency; able to make independent decisions in pursuit of a goal.
- Billy was agentic in his learning and didn't only do what the teacher told him.
- In agentic cognition the ego is a cognitive agent with tasks to accomplish.2000, Tobin Hart, Peter L. Nelson, Kaisa Puhakka, Transpersonal Knowing: Exploring the Horizon of Consciousness, page 186:
4 more examples
- Within this framework, with gender role self-perception conceptualized as independent of biological sex, the agentic construct includes characteristics such as goal-orientation, assertiveness, protectiveness, self-activation, and having the urge to master.2006, Rodney A. Reynolds, Robert Woods, Jason D. Baker, Handbook of Research on Electronic Surveys and Measurements, page 367:
- We have seen that the agentic self identifies values to be striven after, then makes decisions about which values/goals to pursue and then controls pursuit of those goals.2011, Patrick McNamara, The Cognitive Neuropsychiatry of Parkinson's Disease, page 57:
- A single, highly agentic AI system rapidly becomes superintelligent on all human tasks, in a world broadly similar to today. The objective function used to train the system (e.g. ‘maximise production’) doesn't push it to do what we really want, and the system's goals match the objective function.2023, “From Turing's Speculations to an Academic Discipline: A History of AI Existential Safety”, in SJ Beard, Martin Rees, Catherine Richards, Clarissa Rios Rojas, editors, The Era of Global Risk: An Introduction to Existential Risk Studies, Open Book Publishers, →ISBN:
- While previous AI assistants were rules-based and had limited ability to act independently, agentic AI will be empowered to do more on our behalf.2024 December 12, Mark Purdy, “What Is Agentic AI, and How Will It Change Work?”, in Harvard Business Review, archived from the original on 30 Dec 2024:
- Derived terms
- agentic AI, agentically