Agentic AI and Generative AI: What’s the Difference?

Artificial intelligence is showing up in more of our everyday tools, from writing assistants to customer support chats. Two terms you may hear often are agentic AI and generative AI. They’re related, but they describe different ways AI can help.

The simplest way to think about it is this: generative AI creates content in response to a prompt, while agentic AI can work through a goal by taking a series of steps. Knowing the difference makes it easier to understand what these tools can do—and where a person’s judgment still matters.

What is generative AI?

Generative AI is designed to create something new based on patterns it learned from data. Give it a request, and it might write a paragraph, make an image, suggest code, summarise a document or draft an email.

For example, you could ask a generative AI tool to explain a complicated topic in simpler language. It produces an answer based on the request and the information available to it.…