5.1 Agentic AI

Agentic AI is an emerging field that is gaining increasing attention across the AI community. According to ISO/IEC 22989:2022 [i.17], an AI agent is defined as an automated entity that senses and responds to its environment and takes actions to achieve its goals.

Agentic AI systems utilize foundation models across various scales, modalities, and adaptations capable of multi-step reasoning through chain-of-thought approaches to decompose complex problems into manageable steps.

Foundation model-based agents are limited in their knowledge of the environment. They have no direct access to real-time information or data that was not part of their training. AI agents also do not inherently have access to data from the cyber-physical world, such as sensor readings. However, newer generations of foundation models used by AI agents are increasingly capable of tool calling, that is, invoking local software functions, for example to access external data sources.

The models do not necessarily have to be co-located with the agent and can run in the cloud.