Just six months ago, the idea of a business seriously incorporating Agentic AI into its operations would likely have been dismissed as premature. While generative tools, predictive analytics and conversational AI have all advanced rapidly, the notion of software agents autonomously breaking down and executing human workflows remained largely theoretical.
The biggest roadblock was fragmentation — both in tools and in thinking. Enterprise workflows are rarely linear; they span departments, data formats and legacy systems, making end-to-end automation difficult to design and even harder to trust. Many AI deployments operated in silos, useful for isolated predictions or summarizations but incapable of collaborating across a broader process.
On top of that, concerns around governance, data privacy and hallucination risk made leaders understandably hesitant to delegate even low-stakes decisions to software agents. And culturally, few organizations had developed the internal muscle to break complex processes into modular, automatable units — a prerequisite for effective agent design.
What Changed?
In part, the infrastructure matured. Over the past year, large language models and foundational AI components have undergone rapid commoditization. Capabilities once confined to elite research labs are now open source, cloud-native and accessible via APIs. What qualified as state-of-the-art in 2022 has become configurable middleware in 2025. This shift has lowered the barrier to experimentation — allowing enterprises not just to consume AI but to orchestrate and embed it into their existing operational environments.
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But the deeper answer lies in application maturity. Six months ago, most enterprises were still in the experimental phase — dabbling in generative AI, prototyping chatbots and trying to understand what the technology could do. Today, some companies have moved beyond experimentation. They’re beginning to build agent-based systems that integrate with live operational data and drive real business outcomes.
Modular Intelligence
We shouldn’t get overzealous — Agentic AI is still in its early stages. But it’s no longer hypothetical. We’re beginning to see real traction in areas like order management, inventory optimization, quote generation, product matching and anomaly detection. These early use cases are narrow by design, but they’re proving the model works — and setting the stage for more ambitious deployments to follow.
Nor should we jump to conclusions — or succumb to fear. This isn’t full autonomy, and it’s not a black box. It’s simply the next logical progression in AI’s evolution: taming raw capability and compartmentalizing it into specialized, intelligent agents. These agents are compact, purpose-built and designed to replace discrete manual operations. They don’t run wild; they must be linked together in a sequence — by humans — and overseen through active supervision.
Agentic AI will make work more modular, and in doing so will force companies to rethink how they approach labor, scale and strategy. There will be growing pains. But this may be the shape of AI’s endgame.
Finally, an AI that Earns the Self-Driving Comparison
The self-driving car analogy was thrown around a lot during the early wave of LLM hype, but it didn’t quite fit. That phase was more like a driver shouting prompts — “turn right,” “speed up” — with the system only responding reactively and requiring constant input.
Agentic AI, by contrast, earns the comparison. It’s capable of executing multi-step tasks, but still requires oversight. The user must stay engaged, hands on the wheel, eyes on the road. Just like self-driving systems matured from parking assistance to highway navigation and eventually full-route planning under limited conditions, Agentic AI is at its earliest phase — parking assistance. It can reliably handle narrow tasks, but the boundaries are clear, and human supervision is still essential.
Precision Over Scale
Agentic AI also marks a break from the previous paradigm in enterprise AI, which focused on amassing massive datasets and sifting through them for probabilistic insights. Instead of trying to do everything at once, Agentic AI is built for precision. Each agent is designed to perform one task — and perform it flawlessly. Because its scope is narrow, the training and refinement process can be more targeted, with fewer variables clouding the outcome. This lean approach not only improves reliability but also accelerates iteration, since each agent can be tested and improved in isolation before being deployed as part of a broader system.
Say a company wants to automate four functions in sequence: extract a product spec from an email, match that item to a digital catalog, generate a price quote based on historical win rates and flag anomalies in inventory signals. With generalized AI, several issues emerge immediately — lack of precision, unclear decision boundaries and difficulty isolating failure points when something goes wrong.
But with Agentic AI, each rung in that sequence is handled by a specialized agent with a defined input and output. One agent extracts the product spec and passes it — cleanly structured — to the next, which searches the catalog for a match. A third agent takes that match and applies historical pricing logic to generate a quote, and a fourth evaluates the downstream inventory impact. Each component is transparent, auditable and easily tuned — so if something breaks, you know exactly where and why.
Taming the Chaos of B2B Sales
The most compelling use case so far is order management — particularly in B2B environments. B2B has surged in relevance in the post-COVID period, but it brings with it a unique set of logistical and cognitive hurdles. Orders are often large, irregular and submitted through a mix of structured and unstructured channels — email, spreadsheets, PDFs, even images. Matching those requests to available inventory, applying contract-specific pricing and generating accurate quotes is often slow, manual and error-prone.
Consider the case of a commercial furniture supplier receiving large, irregular requests from corporate clients. The inputs vary — sometimes it’s a spreadsheet, sometimes a photo of an old desk, sometimes just a vague email asking for “things like what we ordered last year.” Historically, turning those inputs into actionable quotes required multiple human touch points: interpreting the request, searching the catalog, pricing comparable items, and generating documentation. With Agentic AI, that same workflow can now be executed end-to-end in a fraction of the time — even when the inputs are messy, partial or unstructured.
Full Autonomy Isn’t the Goal
But governance remains the biggest concern. As powerful as these systems are, they introduce new risks around accuracy, accountability, and oversight. When agents are making decisions that directly affect pricing, inventory or customer commitments, organizations need clear guardrails: audit logs, version control and escalation protocols. Without transparency into how agents operate — or the ability to intervene when they go off course — automation can quickly become liability. The challenge isn’t just building capable agents; it’s ensuring they operate within a system that’s controllable, traceable and aligned with business logic.
Governance isn’t just a temporary hurdle for Agentic AI — it’s a permanent fixture. It’s one of the key reasons agentic systems haven’t yet scaled into broader, more autonomous chains, and it’s also part of what will likely prevent full automation altogether.
Even if the technology matures and the models improve, true autonomy is constrained by more than just capability. Data privacy protections, regulatory uncertainty and the need for human judgment in edge cases all make end-to-end automation impractical. Just like self-driving cars still require a steering wheel, Agentic AI may never progress beyond supervised execution. And that’s likely a feature, not a flaw.
It’s important to stress: this isn’t about removing humans from the equation. If anything, it’s about freeing them. By offloading repetitive micro-decisions — like checking which vendors can fulfill an order within a given timeframe or scanning for mismatched SKUs — Agentic AI gives human workers the bandwidth to focus on complex, judgment-driven work. They move from operating the assembly line to engineering it — monitoring, refining and rethinking how the pieces fit together.
There’s also a cognitive lift. Agentic systems act as intelligent copilots, surfacing patterns and insights that would be difficult for any one person to assemble on their own. Over time, this doesn’t just boost efficiency — it improves the quality of strategic decision-making across the organization.
Requires a Shift in Mindset, Not Just Infrastructure
The technology stack behind Agentic AI is becoming increasingly standardized — an open-source blend of orchestration frameworks, vector databases and LLM APIs. Infrastructure alone won’t determine success. The real differentiator will be how deeply domain knowledge is embedded into each agent, and how precisely those agents are designed to reflect real-world workflows. Organizations that understand their operational edge cases, data nuances and decision logic will build systems that are not only functional, but defensible — while others risk assembling generic toolchains that fail to deliver impact.
Companies with deep operational experience — particularly in sectors like retail, logistics and manufacturing — are best positioned to build meaningful agentic workflows. They understand the nuance of decision-making on the ground: where bottlenecks occur, what variables actually move outcomes and what matters most to the customer. That institutional knowledge can be encoded into agents, modularized for reuse and scaled across teams and geographies in a way that generic AI models simply can’t replicate.
But that advantage only holds if companies are willing to reimagine how work gets done. The hardest part of adopting Agentic AI may not be the technology — it may be letting go of the legacy processes, assumptions and mental models that have shaped operations for decades. Modular intelligence demands modular thinking, and that requires a shift not just in systems, but in mindset.
Darpan Seth is CEO of Nextuple, an omnichannel order management advisory and software firm. He can be reached at Darpan.Seth@nextuple.com
