Agentic AI and Multiagentic: Are We Reinventing the Wheel?

Understand

The terms Agentic AI and Multiagentic AI have recently gained popularity in discussions on generative artificial intelligence, often used to describe autonomous software agents and systems composed of such agents.

• However, the use of these terms confuses these buzzwords with well-established concepts in AI literature: intelligent agents and multi-agent systems.
• This article offers a critical analysis of this conceptual misuse.
• We review the theoretical origins of "agentic" in the social sciences (Bandura, 1986) and philosophical notions of intentionality (Dennett, 1971), and then summarise foundational works on intelligent agents and multi-agent systems by Wooldridge, Jennings and others.