Meet agentic AI - chatbots that can make decisions for users

Next wave of advancement in AI expands tech's capabilities, but also presents new risks

- Osmond Chia

Imagine a future where you can instruct a chatbot to order pizza with "no mushroom, cheese only, thin crust, from a place with good reviews". You could sit back as the chatbot trawls through the internet for pizza joints, reads reviews, interacts with other chatbots and places your customized order without you having to do the hard work.

This type of chatbot powered by agentic artificial intelligence (AI) has been billed as the third wave of AI, as it is able to make decisions on behalf of users.

Described by chipmaker Nvidia as "the next frontier of AI", the technology marks the next wave of advancement in AI after machine learning and the emergence since 2022 of generative AI models such as ChatGPT and Midjourney that are capable of creating content.

Unlike earlier AI systems, agentic AI proactively figures out the sequence of steps needed to achieve a goal defined by its user, like ordering pizza, without any human intervention in between.

The technology has been supercharged to work more autonomously, thanks to the progress made with large language models such as ChatGPT, allowing developers to program more complex instructions for agentic AI systems in natural language.

AI's improved reasoning ability marks a fundamental shift in what AI can do for users, but also presents new risks in terms of the damage it can cause.

Tech giants like IBM and Microsoft have been working with enterprise users to develop AI agents that help review and act on customer service requests, among various applications of AI agents.

AI company Anthropic in October rolled out an update to its chatbot Claude 3.5 Sonnet, which can take over a user's mouse and keyboard virtually to complete tasks such as ordering pizza by surfing the web.