Jun 30, 2025

Suddenly, agentic AI is being discussed everywhere. Forrester calls it “the next competitive frontier.” An InfoWorld column says it's “rewriting the future of customer experience.” AdWeek says agentic AI is becoming a “partner,” allowing people to rethink the creative process. And Amazon CEO Andy Jassy wrote a note to his staff saying the “agentic future” is so compelling for the company because “these agents are going to change the scope and speed at which we can innovate for customers. Agents will allow us to start almost everything from a more advanced starting point.” Given the sudden burst of interest, agentic AI risks becoming something that's all too common in business: a topic that everyone is talking about, but that few people actually understand. This creates all sorts of problems. Looking to jump on the bandwagon, organizations often invest in new tools that promise to deliver all the benefits of the latest rage. But executives don't know exactly what they're getting -- and not getting -- from those tools. They're also unaware of pitfalls, and unclear on how to ensure they're getting ROI. Don't let this happen to you. At Nextiva, our team is focused on helping organizations of all kinds improve their customer experience in the most impactful ways possible. So we're on a mission to help people wrap their minds around what agentic AI really is, and how to ensure that it's working for your business. The paradigm shift of autonomy Here's how we define the term: “Agentic AI is an advanced level of artificial intelligence automation that adapts to new data and learns on its own. It operates autonomously and executes tasks based on real-world data. The requirement for human intervention is minimal. Agentic AI plans, reasons, and adapts to optimize complex workflows for expected outcomes.” MORE FOR YOU Today's NYT Mini Crossword Clues And Answers For Monday, June 30 Idaho Shooting: Suspected Gunman Found Dead After 2 Firefighters Are Killed In Sniper Ambush If You See These Messages On Your PC, You're Being Hacked It requires far fewer prompts than generative AI. So when designed well, it makes the customer experience (CX) seamless, moving both the customer and the organization toward key objectives. Agentic AI can achieve things that many businesses didn't see coming. For example, “Systems can identify and address potential problems before customers report them,” according to a recent study published by the Journal of Advances in Developmental Research. These systems also operate with advanced contextual awareness, “understanding dynamic contexts to adjust actions accordingly,” authors Ridhima Arora, Maurya Modi, and Arjun Bhalla write. “Agentic AI represents a paradigm shift in artificial intelligence, characterized by autonomous decision-making capabilities and proactive behavior,” they conclude. Before You Dive In The potential of agentic AI makes it very enticing. But calm heads need to rule. Before adopting a solution, organizations should clearly and carefully plan out the specific functionalities they're seeking. Design use cases, which will allow you to test out specific scenarios to see how well any solution performs. You will also need to make sure that any agentic AI tool you take on can access data across the organization. It needs to comb through your data warehouses or lakes, consolidating and cleaning the records it finds. And it needs updated information whenever and wherever that information comes in, particularly involving customers. So it's best to use agentic AI as part of a unified customer experience management platform ( UCXM ) that pulls together information from every interaction in real time. In addition, all this needs to be done in a way that ensures compliance. Strict guardrails must be in place, with human oversight. Even once you've done all this and get going with agentic AI, there's still work to be done to ensure you're getting the results you need. As my team explains , “Systems require ongoing monitoring, tuning, and adaptation to maintain effectiveness. Collect customer and employee feedback as a practice for continuous AI algorithm improvement.” While these steps are important and take time, they pale in comparison to what agentic AI can offer. No matter the size of your business or the industry you're in, the chances are that you and your customers will find this new technology to be another leap in the right direction -- with better customer experiences, and therefore better business results, providing the clearest signs.