The Term Everyone Uses and Nobody Defines
Your CTO came back from a conference and said the team needs to "go agentic." A vendor pitched you an "agentic data platform" last week. LinkedIn is full of posts about agentic workflows transforming everything from customer support to supply chain management.
And yet, when you ask three people what "agentic" actually means for your data operations, you get four answers.
This is not a vocabulary problem. It is a strategy problem. Organizations are making six-figure decisions about agentic AI without a shared definition of what they are buying, building, or hiring for. That gap between the buzzword and the architecture is where most projects fail -- not because the technology does not work, but because nobody agreed on what it was supposed to do.
This guide is a practitioner's attempt to close that gap. No vendor pitch, no hand-waving. Just a clear definition, a real example, and a framework for deciding whether agentic workflow consulting is something your team actually needs.
