Behind the buzzword
The term covers a range, from an assistant that drafts and waits for approval to a system that runs a whole workflow overnight. Most useful business deployments today sit in the middle: the agent does the steps, and a person approves anything that spends money, contacts a customer for the first time or changes important records.
How to adopt it safely
Start with a narrow, well-defined job and give the agent read access first, then limited write access. Log every action. Review a sample of its work daily at first, then weekly once the error rate is known. Expand its autonomy only when the evidence supports it.
Vendors use 'agentic' loosely, so ask any supplier exactly which actions their agent takes without a human, and what stops it when something unexpected happens.