agentic
Language: English
Part of speech: adj
Pronunciation: ipa: /eɪˈd͡ʒɛn.tɪk/
ipa: /əˈd͡ʒɛn.tɪk/
Forms: form: more agentic
form: most agentic
Etymology: From agent + -ic.
Senses: examples: text: 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).
ref: 1994, Larry Cochran, Joan Laub, Becoming an Agent: Patterns and Dynamics for Shaping Your Life, page 31:
text: The next section examines ways in which network and partnership management may be able to reconcile self-organization with agentic intervention.
ref: 1998, Arie Halachmi, Peter B. Boorsma, Inter and Intra Government Arrangements for Productivity, page 39:
text: 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.
ref: 2025 September 24, Anton Korinek, “AI Agents for Economic Research”, in NBER WB, number 34202, →DOI, page 6:
glosses: That behaves like an agent: able to express or expressing agency or control on one's own behalf or on the behalf of another.
examples: text: Most individuals can be easily triggered to enter, and be comfortable in the agentic state.
text: 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.
ref: 2013, Kenneth S. Bordens, Irwin A. Horowitz, Social Psychology:
topics: human-sciences
psychology
sciences
glosses: That obeys authority (introduced in Milgram's theory).
raw_tags: of a psychological state of a person
examples: text: 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.
ref: 1985, Steve Duck, Daniel Perlman, Understanding Personal Relationships, page 98:
topics: human-sciences
psychology
sciences
glosses: Having to do with performance, or achieving status.
examples: text: Billy was agentic in his learning and didn't only do what the teacher told him.
text: In agentic cognition the ego is a cognitive agent with tasks to accomplish.
ref: 2000, Tobin Hart, Peter L. Nelson, Kaisa Puhakka, Transpersonal Knowing: Exploring the Horizon of Consciousness, page 186:
text: Within this framework, with gender role self-perception conceptualized as independent of biological sex, the agentic construct includes characteristics such as goal-orientation, assertiveness, protectiveness, self-activation, and having the urge to master.
ref: 2006, Rodney A. Reynolds, Robert Woods, Jason D. Baker, Handbook of Research on Electronic Surveys and Measurements, page 367:
text: We have seen that the agentic self identifies values to be striven after, then makes decisions about which values/goals to pursue and then controls pursuit of those goals.
ref: 2011, Patrick McNamara, The Cognitive Neuropsychiatry of Parkinson's Disease, page 57:
text: A single, highly agentic AI system rapidly becomes superintelligent on all human tasks, in a world broadly similar to today. The objective function used to train the system (e.g. ‘maximise production’) doesn't push it to do what we really want, and the system's goals match the objective function.
ref: 2023, “From Turing's Speculations to an Academic Discipline: A History of AI Existential Safety”, in SJ Beard, Martin Rees, Catherine Richards, Clarissa Rios Rojas, editors, The Era of Global Risk: An Introduction to Existential Risk Studies, Open Book Publishers, →ISBN:
text: While previous AI assistants were rules-based and had limited ability to act independently, agentic AI will be empowered to do more on our behalf.
ref: 2024 December 12, Mark Purdy, “What Is Agentic AI, and How Will It Change Work?”, in Harvard Business Review:
topics: human-sciences
psychology
sciences
glosses: Having agency; able to make independent decisions in pursuit of a goal.
Derived terms: agentic AI
agentically
Related terms: agency
agent