At January’s Consumer Electronics Show, NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang boldly proclaimed, “the Age of AI agentics is here.” Just days before, OpenAI’s Sam Altman echoed the chipmaker, blogging “We [OpenAI] believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies.” AI agents are back in vogue.

For the non-technical, “agents” or “agentic AI” refers to AI equipped with not only intelligence, but the ability to autonomously solve complex, multi-step problems. In short, very smart bots.