Talk:AI agent

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Merge proposal

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The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
Partial merge completed. -- Beland (talk) 03:47, 3 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Proposing that Agentic AI be merged into Intelligent agent. As other editors have pointed out, this article falls under WP:REDUNDANT. It will also need cleanup due to the use of marketing hype from questionable sources about what Agentic AI could do, as opposed to what it actually does. TotalVibe945 (talk) 00:31, 15 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Second this proposal and adding only that in my opinion there is not a great quantity of material worth transposing once the speculative sections are excised. Dznz00 (talk) 03:29, 18 May 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I'm rather opposed to a merge. There are many overlapping articles on agents (Intelligent agent, Autonomous agent, Software agent, Rational agent), and yet there wasn't any article that was particularly about recent agents based on generative AI. The article Intelligent agent seems more centered on the theoretical aspects about ideal agents and architectures. I believe the closest match for the article "Agentic AI" would be the article Autonomous AI, because the recent trend in "AI agents" is essentially about autonomy, so I may endorse a merge from one to the other, although I'm not sure which direction is best. Alenoach (talk) 01:56, 1 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that there are a lot of overlapping articles about agents (which could probably stand to be merged themselves eventually, but that's a separate discussion). However, if you haven't already, I recommend reading the Intelligent agent#Alternative definitions and uses section of the Intelligent agent article, which already includes a sub-section on Agentic AI (Disclosure: I wrote a lot of that section starting in January, a month before this article was first published). TotalVibe945 (talk) 13:31, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
To @STEMinfo:
How did you come to the conclusion that intelligent agents are that narrowly defined? According to the opening paragraph of Intelligent agent, "an intelligent agent is an entity that perceives its environment, takes actions autonomously to achieve goals, and may improve its performance through machine learning or by acquiring knowledge." That fits the definition you provided of autonomy and adaptation, hence the redundancy.
Forrester Research is a marketing research firm, and the source you cited here (and which is also cited throughout the article), CIO, is owned by International Data Group, which is owned by Blackstone Inc., so I doubt that either would pass the bar for a reliable source. Either way, is being labeled by a marketing firm as emerging technology really notable by itself? Technologies fall in and out of the Gartner hype cycle all the time.
Speaking of sources, other questionable sources cited in this article appear to be corporate blogspam (SSON, AI World Journal, Positive Psychology, UC Today, Robotics Tomorrow, Healthcare Dive). There are very few news articles or scientific research papers from WP:RS, which means this article has very few specifics about what AI agents are or what they do, no examples of known AI agents like AutoGPT or Manus, and no critical analysis of how they work or don't work in practice.
All of that said, I would be open to at least two other options:
(1) merging with Autonomous agent, as suggested by @Alenoach, on condition that this article is cleaned up to remove questionable sources.
(2) keeping this article separate from Intelligent agent, as at least one source (this pre-print https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10468v4) argues that AI agents and agentic AI are separate concepts, as long as this article cites reliable sources. TotalVibe945 (talk) 13:46, 12 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
This is a term readers will be searching for, and it provides the most utility as a standalone article. I added SSON and Positive Psychology for some uncontroversial items, but there are some other sources that were added to the original article, which I'm not policing. If there's info that you think is incorrect in my original version, please feel free to discuss and edit if you can reach consensus. STEMinfo (talk) 18:33, 15 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I agree that readers are searching for this term. However, they will not be served well by an article with unreliable references. With all due respect, adding references that are questionable, even for statements considered to be uncontroversial, is not responsible editing. I will be flagging this article as such. TotalVibe945 (talk) 18:10, 21 June 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose merge I'm the original author. I'm obviously also opposed to a merge. As I understand it, Agentic AI systems exhibit higher autonomy, being capable of setting and pursuing long-term goals, and adapting strategies as needed. In contrast, Intelligent Agents typically follow predefined rules to achieve specific tasks. Another way of looking at it is though the term "intelligent" is often applied, it is in some sense redundant - if the system does not exhibit some form of dynamic, context-sensitive decision-making, it ceases to be an agent in the first place — it becomes a deterministic automation or a static workflow. The defining characteristic, then, is goal-oriented adaptability within a fixed domain, not general-purpose initiative.
By contrast, Agentic AI refers to systems whose autonomy and adaptability extend beyond a single function or task. They are acting across domains with a degree of initiative that suggests open-endedness, not just task completion. Rather than being bound to one functional area, Agentic AI acts more like a cohesive system capable of orchestrating diverse capabilities in pursuit of evolving objectives.
If that doesn't convince you, research firm research firm Forrester singled out Agentic AI, not intelligent agent, as a top emerging technology for 2025.[1] STEMinfo (talk) 18:27, 15 June 2025 (UTC)![reply]

I'm the original author. I'm obviously also opposed to a merge.

What? How are these two things related? FaviFake (talk) 10:07, 28 September 2025 (UTC)[reply]
Clarifying to the reader that my comment on June 12 was in response to this one, which wasn't signed at the time. Speaking of which, was this comment (at least the two paragraphs comparing intelligent agents and agentic AI) written by an LLM? It sure looks that way. TotalVibe945 (talk) 21:38, 9 November 2025 (UTC)[reply]

References

  1. ^ "Agentic AI: 6 promising use cases for business". CIO.
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

Requested move 5 December 2025

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The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: moved. (closed by non-admin page mover) Jeffrey34555 (talk) 08:39, 18 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Agentic AI → AI agent – This article seems to be more about AI agents as concrete things than Agentic AI as a general concept. * Pppery * it has begun... 21:25, 5 December 2025 (UTC) — Relisting. Vestrian24Bio 13:40, 12 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

Question/comment: How are you differentiating between agentic AI and AI agents? Most sources I've seen (with the exception of this pre-print: https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.10468v4) treat them as synonyms, more or less. If you know of a better source that treats them differently, I'm all ears. TotalVibe945 (talk) 15:50, 6 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
I feel like the main point and why the move is suggested is that they are mainly seen as synonyms, and "AI agent" is probably the more commonly used. CrushedAsian255 (talk) 07:35, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Oppose We already have an article, intelligent agent, that is about AI agents. I can't say how the two can be reconciled, perhaps a full-article merger is in order, but moving this page to a near-duplicate name is not really going to help, just create even more of an overlap. ᴢxᴄᴠʙɴᴍ (ᴛ) 00:08, 7 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I feel like merging the articles is probably a good idea, but if we don't do that then this page should be renamed. My only issue with merging the pages is that when people talk about 'AI agents' people usually mean specifically agents running on Large language models, where "intelligent agent" can be anything, although this is more a comment on the mess that is AI marketing. CrushedAsian255 (talk) 07:33, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
    I would support a merge to Intelligent agent in principle. Most of the content was originally there, and merging the two pages in that direction was what I originally intended in the previous merge proposal. I agree with your point regarding how AI agents now have a very specific meaning. I would hesitate to re-merge for two other reasons. Both articles are fairly long, so it may be easier for readers to follow the topic of AI agents as a separate article rather than as a combined one. On the other hand, the other reason is that the articles about agents in general in my view are redundant (this article, Intelligent agent, Autonomous agent, etc.), so there should be a discussion on how to handle them more broadly. TotalVibe945 (talk) 14:22, 11 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
  • Support. I think the issue of overlap with intelligent agent will exist no matter what this article is called. The two are separate principles, but they have enough conceptual overlap that they should probably be merged eventually. In the meantime, AI agent is probably the best title for this article to curb confusion in addition to being the COMMONNAME as 1isall pointed out. Thanks, Glasspalace (talk) 03:02, 17 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]
The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

arXiv

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Hi @Grayfell. I saw that you added the unreliable sources tag because several arXiv papers were cited. Can you explain more on your reasoning?

I agree with you and WP:ARXIV that preprints are unreliable in general. However, my view is that preprints are okay in certain circumstances:

- Per WP:ARXIV, when the author is a subject matter expert, as in the case of Arvind Narayanan, whose preprint "AI Agents That Matter" I cited.

- When attribution is explicitly provided, such as by saying "According to a preprint study", for example.

- When a news article or other reliable source cites that preprint (attribution should be provided here as well).


While we're on the subject, arXiv preprints are all over Wikipedia, despite WP:ARXIV and particularly in technical articles, and it's not fully clear to me when it is and isn't okay to cite them. TotalVibe945 (talk) 13:22, 22 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]

For future reference, this is the edit which imported the Arvind Narayanan cite from Intelligent agent. In that edit, both uses of that cite are for broad and relatively vague claims that don't need a preprint.
There are multiple problems with using preprints, especially for 'trendy' topics like LLMs. I think the over-use of preprints on Wikipedia should be viewed as a mess that needs to be cleaned-up. I don't think this problem should be viewed as an excuse to add more.
Even when the author is a subject matter expert, these preprints are still usually WP:PRIMARY sources for those authors' views. Many of these preprints never get published, so they end up as blog posts wearing an academic costumes. WP:SPS is another way to look at that kind of source.
Subject matter experts can still make mistakes, trivial asides, and even fabrications, so it's better to rely on secondary/independent sources. To put it another way, content which has not yet been peer-reviewed should not be presented in exactly the same way as reliable sources. One way to make this distinction clearer is via attribution, but such attribution can artificially inflate the importance of the source. Instead, we should use reliable sources to determine which perspectives are encyclopedically important. Relying on our own opinions or levels of interest is sometimes very understandable, but it's sill WP:OR.
I hope that's helpful. Grayfell (talk) 20:10, 22 December 2025 (UTC)[reply]