Beyond Conversations: How Agentic AI is driving autonomous actions

Hello Friends,

Hope you all are doing well !!!

How many of you have used ChatGPT or Gemini to help yourselves with daily tasks? For example, planning a trip. You simply type, “Plan me a 5-day trip to Bali (or wherever you want to travel)” and ChatGPT prints out a nice travel itinerary. Isn’t that great?

Once you complete the travel plan, the next step is to book tickets and accommodations. For that, you need to visit another website or websites. Wouldn’t it be great if AI could perform these tasks too on your behalf? And this is what we will discuss in this post. So, let’s get started!

The Conversation AI era

Although AI isn’t new, ChatGPT has sparked a revolution since its release. There have been many other similar bots, like Google’s Gemini, which can have natural conversations with users and produce fantastic output. Since these interactions are more natural and engaging, they have found use cases in every industry along with daily life.

The Limitations of Conversational AI

Conversational AI is impressive but dependent on user prompts. It can provide information, answer questions, or run simple script-based automation, but it lacks the autonomy to take action independently. This limitation hinders its potential to truly assist users in a meaningful way, as in our previous example where users still need to book travel, transport, or stays themselves.

Enters Agentic AI

Agentic AI, or AI agents, are advanced AI systems that can perform tasks autonomously with minimal human intervention. It can:

• Initiate Actions: Complete tasks without explicit instructions.
• Make Decisions: Analyze information and make informed decisions.
• Collaborate with other AI Agents: Work with other AI agents to achieve complex goals. This is much needed for complex task where individual agents perform specific tasks. This is called Multi-Agentic model.

Major tech giants are already heavily invested in Agentic AI as below:

• Microsoft’s Magnetic One integrates with enterprise ecosystems to automate workflows and optimize operations.
• Google’s Jarvis acts as a personal assistant capable of multi-modal input processing and real-world decision-making.
• OpenAI’s Swarm focuses on collaborative agents that work together to solve large-scale problems autonomously

Agentic AI Use cases

Agentic AI has use cases across industries and domains for example:

Travel Planning and Management – Plan an itinerary, book flights, hotels, and transportation even for multi-destination trip, reschedule bookings or adapt plans in real-time based on delays or cancellations

Healthcare Assistance – Schedule doctor appointments, refill prescriptions, and track medication adherence

Customer Support – Resolve customer issues end-to-end, collaborate with human agents to handle escalations

E-commerce and Retail – Manage inventory and automatically restock supplies, handle personalized shopping for customers, negotiate deals or compare prices across vendors autonomously

Education and Training – Act as a virtual tutor with customized learning paths based on a student’s progress, automatically schedule and track deadlines for coursework and assignments

Are we there yet?

So now that we understand Agentic AI’s growing traction, is it ready for general use? Agentic AI is still in its early stages and needs to evolve for widespread use. As Microsoft says, “While Magnetic One shows strong generalist capabilities, it’s still far from human-level performance and can make mistakes.” Similarly, OpenAI has tagged Swarm as “experimental & educational.” Agentic AI has to address ethical concerns, but the biggest risk is its potential to take undesirable actions autonomously.

The Future of AI

The future of AI is about going beyond conversation and getting things done autonomously, using Agentic AI. It has the potential to revolutionize every business vertical as well as our daily lives and work. Due to its potential, we now see so many enterprises and startups working in this space. Still, it’s not a one-day revolution, but a gradual evolution to create responsible solutions.

So that’s all for this post! Please let me know your thoughts and, if you’ve tried any of these devices, share your experiences. See you soon in the next post. Until then, stay healthy and blessed!