This is the 13th instalment of AI Fluency Corner, a 16-part weekly series in Business Day building one connected mental model of artificial intelligence (AI), in plain language.
Until recently AI’s signature act was the answer. It summarised the report, drafted the email, analysed the spreadsheet and waited for a person to decide what happened next. Agentic AI changes the verb. It can search records, choose a sequence of steps, call other systems, create or change information, check whether the action worked and continue towards a defined outcome.
The frontier is therefore no longer only what AI can say, but what software may be permitted to do without waiting. Last week we examined what happens when organisational knowledge enters an AI system. This week: what changes when that intelligence acquires tools, memory and authority.
From assistance to agency
An assistant predicts and generates. It waits for an instruction, processes it and returns an output for a person to use. An agent receives a goal, plans the steps, calls tools, reads the result, adjusts and continues. The assistant helps you drive; the agent has been given keys — ideally not to the entire building.
