"Agentic"

As if the generative AI hype wasn’t enough, CX vendors have recently slapped on a new catchphrase to maximize their marketing effect in customer service oriented AI.

Agentic.

As I type out the word I immediately notice that the word processing app doesn’t like it. It alerts me with glaring red dots underlining the word, to shame me into recognizing my lapse in basic comprehension of the English language—“IT IS NOT A REAL WORD. Please make a correction.”

I cannot even fathom how CX reporters and analysts who use Grammarly would survive the coming onslaught of humiliation having to type “agentic AI” time and time again in their commentaries and research. Do you mean “agent AI”? Perhaps “agency AI”? Or, God forbid, “against AI”? Grammarly does not shy away from being a passive-aggressive writer’s helper.

And before you ask—yes, I have done the fact-checking. This is not an obscure, rarely used word. It is indeed not a word. No dictionary in existence contains the word “agentic.” It’s not in the Oxford English, Cambridge, Merriam-Webster, or Dictionary.com. I’ve even gone as far as looking it up online in the Urban Dictionary.

Nowhere to be found.

And what does it say about our society, even our niche CX techie society, when we start using a word that Urban Dictionary doesn’t have a record of? Is the word even worthy of being in the lexicon when it’s not found alongside “hangry,” “catfish,” and “boomer”?

Setting aside the linguistic oddity, what are these CX marketers trying to convey in “agentic AI”?

From perusing various press releases, blog posts, news headlines from CX vendors, what I gather is an evolution of AI capabilities in the customer service use cases. When the generative AI genie was unleashed a few years ago, CX vendors naturally saw the potential of using it for agent assistance and for conversational customer interactions. Now CX vendors are elevating their AI agent capabilities to perceive context and handle more complex language, greater autonomy and decision-making, in hopes to further exceed CX expectations.

So will “agentic AI” finally replace human agents? Maybe some, certainly not all. Because while sales and marketing teams may promise the world, it is not “one size fits all” and highly dependent on the business, the data, and lots of integrations to really ensure it works well for you and your customers.

In conclusion, beware of yet another CX marketing buzzword making the rounds. This time you can say with confidence that it’s not even a real word… yet.