Extract from Joe Patrice’s article, “Agentic AI And The QWERTY Problem.”
For the past year, the technology hype cycle belongs to “agentic” AI. Is it different than the AI chatbots that dominated the previous few years? It depends on how you look at it. The agentic pitch is that users can outsource more of mental drudgery to the AI because it can figure out how to reach your goal without having to be prompted every step of the way.
But the way it does this is, to oversimplify a bit, by deploying the same old AI and running it through a cascading stream of prompts composed by the AI itself. Which moves a lot of work off the user’s plate. It also introduces more points of potential failure.
A year ago, I expected that “agentic” would fail as a legal tech selling point because lawyers would never accept a marketing pitch based on the premise that they should forfeit more decision making. Vendors using the agentic lingo could just as easily describe their products as “vetted workflow automations” or something equally reassuring for lawyers. The stuff being called “agentic” in the legal context always came with enough caveats and guardrails to distance the products from what the general tech community branded as agentic.
