April 2026
Beginner
320 pages
8h 45m
English
Content preview from Data Makes the World Go 'Round
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Chapter 18Agentic AI
In this chapter, we will examine the following:
- Agentic AI
- How agentic AI works
- The orchestration layer
- Examples of real-world agentic applications
- Opportunities and risks
Chapter 17 explored generative AI (GenAI), systems that create new content based on what they’ve learned from massive datasets. GenAI marks a turning point: AI isn’t just analyzing data—it is producing something new from it. While these systems are impressive in their own right, they don’t take action. The next evolution of AI is agentic AI. In this chapter, we’ll look at agentic AI—what it is, how it works, and the opportunities and risks it poses.
What Is Agentic AI?
GenAI, powered by large foundation models, is revolutionizing the way people interact with data and technology. Organizations are using GenAI to democratize AI through natural language interfaces, copilots, assistants, and creative tools that can draft text, summarize reports, or generate images on demand. Yet as transformative as this is, these systems remain largely reactive. They respond to prompts but do not decide what to do next. They do not plan, reason over time, or act toward goals. In short, they generate but they don’t take action. Enter agentic AI, one of the hottest topics in AI today. Once mature, it may have the ability to completely disrupt how a lot of work is done.
Agentic AI extends GenAI by embedding intelligence within autonomous or semi-autonomous systems that can plan, reason, and take actions ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
I’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.Amir M.
I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.