The Rise Of Agentic AI

For a while now, we’ve treated AI like a tool.

A clever one… a fast one… often an annoying one.
But still… a tool.
You ask and it answers. 
You prompt and it spits. 
You feed it words and it feeds you back something to work with.

But that’s not what’s happening anymore.

We’re about to cross a line.
Not with a bang… but with a whisper.
A small update here… a quiet launch there… a twist on a few tools that people are already tinkering with.

But when you zoom out?

It’s not a tool anymore.
It’s an agent.
It doesn’t just respond… it plans.
It doesn’t just react… it executes.
It doesn’t just answer… it acts.

We’re in what I’d call the “pinhole to floodgate” moment of Agentic AI.

We cracked the door open… you can peak… and the light is already coming in.
The new generation of AI (take a look at OpenAI’s recent launch of ChatGPT Agent) can chain tasks together, hold goals in memory and navigate uncertainty (and websites) to accomplish open-ended instructions.

These systems don’t just help you work… they are a worker.

And unlike human workers, they don’t sleep…
They don’t wait for approval… they don’t stop until the task is done… or broken.
And yes, they’re clunky… slow… requiring a ton of supervision… and they’re getting it woefully wrong right now.

But every company in the AI arms race is pointing their smartest minds at this exact shift.

It feels less about getting to super intelligence and more about getting to agentic work.
Because if you can be agentic, will anyone care if it nails whatever definition we have for “super intelligence”?
And while it might be not so good right now, nothing about AI ever resides in stasis.

But this is where my brain is currently spinning:

When your digital assistant becomes an employee… then a team… then a manager…
What does that make you?
Where does agency lie when the agent now has some agency of its own?
When we’re just overseeing the actions with minimal input (err… prompts).
We’re not just building smarter systems.
We’re training them to do our tasks… and then delegate.

This isn’t just AI that mimics intelligence.

It’s AI that decides.
That sequences.
That adapts.
That learns your needs.
That gets better at the doing because it’s able to see, search and click at scale.

Maybe soon we won’t be prompting a single model, but managing networks of agents?

Each with a specialty, a role and a mission.
And like all tech shifts, we’ll act like this is gradual.
Until suddenly… it’s not.

What was it that Kevin Kelly said: The future happens very slowly and then all at once.

Suddenly your competitor launches a product in days instead of months.
Suddenly your inbox is triaged by an AI… who knows your priorities better than you do.
Suddenly your kid’s homework isn’t just written by a bot… it’s critiqued, revised and defended in conversation… by the same system (that’s also teaching your kid how and why it did what it did).

This is (maybe) the quiet inflection point.

The one we’ll look back on and say,
“That’s when it changed. That’s when AI went from mirror to mover.”
And the question we’ll ask then (that maybe we should be asking now):
If your business, your creativity, your leadership is still built around static tools or this belief that these skills are solely the domain of us in our protein forms…

What happens when the rest of the world starts building with agents?

This is what Elias Makos and I discussed on CJAD 800 AM.

Mitch Joel · The Rise Of Agentic AI – The Elias Makos Show – CJAD 800

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