The meeting that broke me

It's 2:15pm. The room has no windows, the AC has given up, and the person at the front has been presenting for 45 minutes. We're on slide 31. Of 90.

Every slide throws another term at us. Agentic AI. LLMs. RAG. ReAct. Fine-tuning. GenAI. NLP. Orchestration. And three words keep coming back like a chorus: assistant, copilot, agent.

I look around. Twenty colleagues, twenty polite faces, and not one person who could explain the difference if you paid them.

"The age of agentic AI is here," the presenter announces.

Nobody moves. Someone's laptop fan spins up. The deck rolls on.

If that sounds familiar, this post is for you.

This isn't about vocabulary. It's about ROI.

ChatGPT went public on 30 November 2022 . Since then the tools have multiplied, and the jargon has multiplied faster. Most of us now use ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude every day. Far fewer of us know how to turn that into something a business can actually measure.

The gap is real.…