The question is: what can it actually do in my systems? Not what it can say, and not what it can answer. If the honest answer is that it responds and then passes anything real to a human, that is a chatbot, possibly an excellent one, but nothing new. If it can update the CRM record, move the appointment, issue the refund, and knows where it should stop and fetch a person, that is something else.

Underneath the question sits a four-word definition worth stealing: model, tools, loop, goal. The turn comes late and it is the important part. When a chatbot gets confused it gives a wrong answer, which is annoying. When an agentic system gets confused it takes a wrong action, which is money, trust, and compliance. Watch this before your next vendor evaluation.

What this video covers

• Why the word agentic now means whatever the person selling it needs it to mean
• Where the word came from, and why agency in the full human sense is not what these systems have
• The four-word definition builders have landed on, model, tools, loop, and goal, with each part unpacked
• A worked example of the loop, walking every step a real agent takes to move a booking from Wednesday to Friday
• Why agentic does not mean self-directed, since the goal still comes from a person or another system
• Why the failure mode changes from a wrong answer to a wrong action, and why that is the reason the steps that write to your systems should run as deterministic flows the agent invokes

Chapters

• 0:00 Nobody agrees what agentic means
• 1:48 Where the word came from
• 2:36 The definition computer science has used for decades
• 3:41 How the word reached customer support
• 5:08 Model, tools, loop, and goal
• 6:54 Moving a booking, step by step
• 8:20 What changes for a support team
• 9:25 Wrong answers versus wrong actions
• 10:07 Which steps should stay deterministic
• 11:35 The one question to ask a vendor