We have become accustomed to generative artificial intelligence in the past couple of years. That will not go away, but increasingly, it will serve in support of agents. “Where generative AI creates, agentic AI acts.” That’s how my trusted assistant, Gemini 2.5 Pro deep research, describes the difference. By the way, I commonly use Gemini 2.5 Pro as one of my research tools, as I have in this column, however, it is I who writes the column. Agents, unlike generative tools, create and perform multistep goals with minimal human supervision. The essential difference is found in its proactive nature. Rather than waiting for a specific, step-by-step command, agentic systems take a high-level objective and independently create and execute a plan to achieve that goal. This triggers a continuous, iterative workflow that is much like a cognitive loop.
