## What Is Agentic AI?

Agentic AI represents a brand new type of artificial intelligence that can think, plan, and take action all by itself. Unlike older AI that just answers questions, agentic AI can handle complicated jobs that have many steps. For example, an AI agent could book a vacation for you by understanding what you want, checking prices, comparing flights, and then making the reservation. These smart computer helpers can work across different apps and systems to get things done without a human telling them each step.

## The Money Side: A Huge Market Growing Fast

Big money is flowing into agentic AI because everyone thinks it will be the next huge technology revolution. Right now in 2025, companies are spending about 7.8 billion dollars on agentic AI. But look at what happens next! By 2030, spending is expected to jump to over 50 billion dollars. That's more than six times bigger! The spending is growing so quickly that by 2029, one out of every four dollars companies spend on technology will go to agentic AI. Compared to regular AI that grows at 90% per year, agentic AI is growing at 175% per year - that's almost twice as fast!

## What Big Companies Are Doing Right Now

Amazon, Microsoft, Google, and Salesforce are all racing to build agentic AI systems that companies can use. This week, Amazon announced 29 new features for its Amazon Connect system that let AI agents handle customer service all by themselves. These agents can understand what customers want, even when the questions are complicated, and they can take action to help the customer. If something is too hard for the AI agent, it can hand the customer over to a real person to help.

Microsoft is taking a different approach with Agent 365, a central control room for managing all AI agents inside Microsoft 365, which millions of businesses already use. Instead of asking companies to learn a completely new system, Microsoft is putting AI agent management into tools companies already know. Think of it like giving IT departments their own human resources department, but for robots instead of people.

Wealth management companies are also jumping in. They're using agentic AI to help financial advisors work better with their clients. Instead of advisors doing every little task by hand, AI agents can handle research, follow-ups, and suggestions so advisors can focus on bigger decisions.

## The Security Problem: Keeping AI Agents Honest

Here's the tricky part: if AI agents can work by themselves, how do we make sure they don't do bad things? Companies need to prove that each AI agent is real and trustworthy before letting it make important decisions. Right now, some AI agents use weak passwords and tokens that bad people can trick or steal. Companies like authID are creating the Mandate Framework, which uses fingerprints and special security codes to make sure every AI agent is working for a real person and only doing what it's allowed to do.

Security experts are warning that without proper safeguards, AI agents can be used to attack companies. For example, a fake agent could pretend to be a real one and trick a company into approving a fake purchase order, or it could sneak into a computer system to steal secret information. Last week, fraudsters successfully attacked over 30 companies by using AI agents, which shows how serious this problem really is. Organizations need new identity and access rules just for AI agents, kind of like how we have rules for people accessing computers.

## Shopping and Paying with AI Agents

Agentic AI is starting to change how people buy things and make payments online. A group called EMVCo, which makes the rules for credit card payments, is now working on how to make it safe for AI agents to make purchases on your behalf. Imagine an AI agent that knows you're running low on milk, sees that milk is on sale at your favorite store, and automatically orders some for you. But we have to make sure that the AI agent is really authorized to spend your money.

Amazon is even getting into trouble over this. The company is suing another AI company called Perplexity because it says Perplexity's AI agent secretly accessed customer accounts to order things without permission. This shows why trust and security rules are so important for agentic AI commerce.

## How This Changes People's Jobs

The arrival of agentic AI is changing what kind of jobs people will have in the future. Some companies are already redesigning their organizational structures to include both people and AI agents working together as a team. Business leaders are so focused on this that some companies have created brand new leadership positions just to manage this change, and some have merged their technology department with their human resources department.

The good news is that companies aren't just getting rid of all their workers. Even though AI agents are doing more work, companies are actually hiring more people because they can do bigger, better projects faster. However, workers need to learn new skills to work alongside AI agents. Nearly 9 out of 10 business leaders expect AI to completely transform what jobs look like and what people do at work in the next year alone.

## Looking Ahead: The Future of Work

Experts believe we're moving toward what they call "cognitive enterprises" where human workers and AI agents collaborate together every single day. Nvidia's leader Jensen Huang recently said that the transition to agentic and physical AI will be revolutionary and will create brand new applications, companies, products, and services that we haven't even thought of yet.

The organizations that will win in this new world are the ones that get ready now. They need to fix their business processes to work with AI agents, train their workers to use this new technology, and build strong security systems to keep the AI agents from doing anything wrong. While this all sounds like a lot of change - and it is - the companies that prepare now will have a huge advantage over the companies that wait to get started.