agentic

Adjective

agentic (comparative more agentic, superlative most agentic)

1. That behaves like an agent: able to express or expressing agency or control on one's own behalf or on the behalf of another.
   • From the perspective of the previous chapter, to change from a patient to an agent is to adopt or elaborate an agentic plot that the person lives (Howard 1989).1994, Larry Cochran, Joan Laub, Becoming an Agent: Patterns and Dynamics for Shaping Your Life, page 31
   • The next section examines ways in which network and partnership management may be able to reconcile self-organization with agentic intervention.1998, Arie Halachmi, Peter B. Boorsma, Inter and Intra Government Arrangements for Productivity, page 39
   1. Acting autonomously on behalf of a user; (now especially artificial intelligence) involving the use of agentic AI.
      • Over the last decade, IoT-enabled objects have steadily progressed from being passive to becoming agentic—actively capturing and storing data, communicating information among objects or with users, and offering suggestions to users.2012 September 5, Haiyan Jia, Mu Wu, Eunhwa Jung, Alice Shapiro, S. Shyam Sundar, “Balancing Human Agency and Object Agency: An End-User Interview Study of the Internet of Things”, in Proceedings of...
      • Sometimes agentic systems detect and correct mistakes, but at other times, mistakes compound through multi-agent workflows and may give rise to computational cascades where errors, tool failures, or incomplete data can propagate undetected and enter the final output.2025 September, Anton Korinek, “AI Agents for Economic Research”, in NBER WB, number 34202, →DOI, page 6
2. (broadly) That obeys authority (introduced in Milgram's theory).
   • Most individuals can be easily triggered to enter, and be comfortable in the agentic state.
   • Milgram (1974) suggested that one factor contributing to the maintenance of obedience was that the individual in the obedience situation entered into an agentic state, which involves a person's giving up his or her normal moral and ethical standards in favor of those of the authority figure.2013, Kenneth S. Bordens, Irwin A. Horowitz, Social Psychology
3. Having to do with performance, or achieving status.
   • If helping is a variation on the more general agentic theme of self-assertion and display, one might expect that power motivation would predict other forms of agentic striving in friendship experiences.1985, Steve Duck, Daniel Perlman, Understanding Personal Relationships, page 98
4. Having agency; able to make independent decisions in pursuit of a goal.
   • Billy was agentic in his learning and didn't only do what the teacher told him.
   • In agentic cognition the ego is a cognitive agent with tasks to accomplish.2000, Tobin Hart, Peter L. Nelson, Kaisa Puhakka, Transpersonal Knowing: Exploring the Horizon of Consciousness, page 186