What is Agentic AI?
Agentic AI is AI that can plan and execute multi-step tasks with a degree of autonomy, often by using tools, APIs, or other systems to pursue a goal. It is important in compliance because greater autonomy increases operational, security, and accountability risks when actions are taken without direct human control.
In Depth
In practice, agentic AI may draft and send emails, trigger workflows, query internal systems, make purchases, or chain actions across software tools based on a user prompt or delegated objective. Compliance teams need to define approval boundaries, logging, escalation rules, access restrictions, and testing for unintended actions because failures can create financial, legal, privacy, or cybersecurity incidents.
This concept is increasingly relevant to AI governance because existing controls for models that only generate content may be insufficient when the system can act in the environment. It is most closely connected to the EU AI Act, ISO/IEC 42001, NIST AI RMF, ISO 27001, and DORA or NIS2 where operational resilience, access control, incident handling, and third-party risk are important.
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