Get your agentic here! Hot off the press!

Expect a lot of this “we have ‘Agentic’ at home, honey” from incumbent vendors scrambling to make sure they don’t let a funny new word pry open the lock-in their customers have for their product.

Not criticizing it--it's smart. There’s two reasons this is easy to do:

First, as a marketing word, “agentic” is illusory. It’s a moving goalpost that can be tagged on to any application that was already branded as AI/ML. A chat app? That’s just a single-step agent. CRM data enrichment? That’s a sales enrichment agent. Email sequencing? That’s an email agent.

Everything is agentic; nothing is (well, actually some things are, but more on that later).

Second, most customers don’t really care about whether a software is “agentic”, but it’ll soon take up enough of the collective corporate consciousness that it’ll be part of their job to have an opinion on “agentic” things. Bolting on agentic marketing makes sure your customers can still lean on you as a reliable answer to the inevitable “what’s our 2025 agent strategy” question from their colleagues.

To be clear, I do think there’s a pretty specific definition for what makes an agent-based software product, and I don’t think it’s pure marketing-speak when OpenAI and friends say they are re-aligning their development around a belief in agent-based applications. That’s a conversation for another day.