AI Agents vs. Agentic AI
Alejandro Cuauhtemoc-Mejia
Global Growth Marketing | AI Strategy | Book Author
📍 Cornell Johnson Graduate School of Management and the M.Sc. in Computer Science, University of the Peloponnese have released a groundbreaking paper titled “AI Agents vs. Agentic AI: A Conceptual Taxonomy, Applications and Challenges” (May 2025), aiming to draw a clear boundary between two emerging paradigms in AI: AI Agents and Agentic AI.
🔗 Free access to the paper: AI Agents vs. Agentic AI (arXiv, May 2025)
🧠 What’s the Difference?
The authors Ranjan Sapkota Konstantinos Roumeliotis Manoj Karkee argue that while AI Agents are modular systems largely driven by #LLMs (e.g., for support, scheduling, and summarization tasks), Agentic AI represents a shift toward systems that reason, collaborate, and act with purpose in open, complex environments.
Think of AI Agents as highly advanced tools, while Agentic AI systems act more like autonomous problem-solvers: with memory, reasoning, multi-agent coordination, and goal-setting.
Key Contributions
A conceptual taxonomy to distinguish agent types
Comparative application mapping (e.g., customer support vs. scientific research automation)
Discussion of challenges like hallucinations, brittleness, and coordination failure
Introduction of engineering patterns like ReAct loops, RAG, and orchestration layers
A roadmap for building scalable, interpretable agent-based AI
A figure in the paper highlights growing global search trends for "AI Agents" and "Agentic AI" since the release of ChatGPT in late 2022, underscoring public interest in how AI systems evolve from task-executors to autonomous collaborators.
🧪 Theoretical Foundations
The paper builds on the foundational work of Giangiacomo Castelfranchi and Ferber-Software GmbH in social action theory and Multi-Agent Systems (MAS), offering a bridge between symbolic reasoning and the new wave of LLM-driven AI.
This paper is a must-read for anyone building next-generation AI products. Whether you're designing customer support agents or AI co-pilots in complex workflows, understanding the difference between automation and agency is crucial for safety, scalability, and innovation.
📖 Read the full paper here: 👉 https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10468