Extract from Rhys Hodkinson and Sigurjón Ísaksson’s article “From Chatbots to Agents: The Real Promise of Agentic AI (and Why It Starts With Workflow Ownership)”
Agentic AI is the newest innovation buzzword in legal technology. Vendors are racing to declare their tools agentic, promising transformation of every workflow from drafting to review. But in this frenetic moment, many products claiming to be agents are, in reality, little more than chatbots with a single integration. This may be a contributing factor to why nearly half of AI projects will be scrapped by 2027, according to Gartner.
Clearly there is untold business value if organizations can get beyond buzzwords and ChatGPT chatbots to the real promise of agentic AI—but how?
Defining What’s Agentic
Before we can evaluate any claims, we first need clarity: what actually makes an AI system agentic?
A true agentic system consists of three interconnected components—a reasoning layer, tool access, and workflow ownership.
