Agentic AI

Overview

Agentic AI refers to AI systems that observe, reason, plan, use tools, and take autonomous multi-step actions — as distinct from conversational AI that responds to a single prompt and stops. An agentic system consists of a large language model (LLM) inside a harness that orchestrates memory management, tool invocation, sub-agent spawning, and action execution, often without continuous human intervention between steps. The defining characteristic is that the agent acts on behalf of a user or system over an extended period, carrying context forward across steps and adapting its plan based on intermediate results.

The commercial inflection arrived in early 2026. GitHub data cited at Computex showed AI-driven development reaching 1.4 billion commits/month, 90 million pull requests/month, and 20 million new repositories/month — nearly a tripling from 2025's 500 million commits/month. Every major semiconductor CEO at Computex 2026 organized their keynote around the agentic transition, treating it as the dominant architectural shift of the era.