Agentic AI

Agentic AI refers to AI that sets its own plan and completes a task through multiple steps, without a person directing every move.

Here's an analogy. Older AI was like a help-desk clerk who only answers the question you ask. Agentic AI is more like an assistant you send on an errand who stops by the bank and the post office, handles everything, and comes back. If a document turns out to be wrong along the way, it fixes it and moves on to the next counter itself.

This is already happening in practice. At Formula One (F1), connecting new data into their systems used to take people 6 to 8 weeks. When agentic AI took over the process, it was reduced to about 40 minutes of coding work. The repetitive task of checking schemas and catching errors, once done by people, was instead diagnosed and fixed by the AI on its own.

At AI Summit Seoul 2026, 'Agents & Agentic AI' was set up as its own conference track, and the event's overarching theme was 'the rise of enterprise agents.' In the AWS and F1 case study, it came up in the form of statements like 'using agentic AI, they cut data onboarding from 8 weeks to 40 minutes.'

A common point of confusion is treating agentic AI as just a 'smart chatbot.' A chatbot only gives you an answer when you ask a question, but agentic AI, when given a goal, breaks it down into steps on its own, calls on tools as needed, and carries the task through to completion.

You can feel the difference by asking an AI chatbot to do a 'task' rather than just answer a question.

Example prompt: "Plan a 3-day, 2-night trip to Busan for next week, including transportation methods and estimated costs for each day. Feel free to look up any information you need on your own."

If, instead of a single flat answer, you see the AI breaking the plan into steps and calling on tools like search or calculation to fill in missing information, that's agentic AI at work.