Review 2025 and outlook 2026: Shift from GenAI to Agentic AI

Digital transformation has progressed rapidly over the past few years, moving from automation to machine learning, to GenAI, and now to Agentic AI, especially since 2022. The entire world is aligned with this shift and watching closely to see what comes next. Businesses have experienced accelerating growth, and individuals have found their daily tasks becoming quicker and easier. 

The wider access to GenAI in 2022 made a huge impact. Enterprises leveraged it extensively, from data processing to ROI analysis. However, the real breakthrough came in 2025, with a massive shift toward Agentic AI—a self-directed AI paradigm evolving from prompt-based, data-oriented assistance. Agentic AI systems have now become the autonomous, self-sufficient standard across many enterprises.

As 2025 wraps up, it’s clear that enterprises are moving beyond passive, prompt-driven GenAI. With Agentic AI rising, businesses now rely on systems that can autonomously reason, plan and act, with minimal input. This marks a major shift in how organisations operate and innovate, pushing AI into full operational mode far beyond simple content generation. 

The future is action-oriented intelligence, and 2026 will accelerate this shift with the huge adoption of autonomous AI agents that become the core digital workers across industries. 

2025: When enterprise AI came to limelight 
In 2025, businesses realised they couldn't do business as usual with GenAI. And so, chatbots, copilots and content models helped automate most tasks. But a person still had to choreograph the complete workflow: writing an email, summarising a document, or analysing a dataset; however, the systems couldn’t close the loop alone. Every functioning of GenAI needs assistance and the employee resources to do it. 
  
Why keep humans as delay point?
This is where the need arose, driven by the high demand from businesses: if AI can handle certain tasks, why invest manpower that could be used for more efficient work? Agentic AI was born with that simple premise: to create systems that don't answer, instead, plan, decide and execute on their own.

In such a case, an autonomous AI agent would be able to gather data from several sources, execute multi-step workflows, interact with more agents, make decisions based on goals and constraints, and self-correct according to results.  
  
Retailers are testing AI that manages micro-inventory, predicts demand, and even negotiates with suppliers. In BFSI, compliance agents track new regulations and generate audit-ready reports. The shift is clear: GenAI was a tool; Agentic AI is your teammate!

What makes Agentic AI clear-cut winner in 2025? 
Three major trends influenced the wide adoption of Agentic AI within organizations: 

Degree of urgency in terms of competition and cost
The amount of competition and increasing costs of operations have created an urgent need for businesses to invest in additional automation. Now that autonomous AI agents are capable of automating 60-to-70 per cent of all the manual work required in support, logistics, procurement, governance, etc.

Multilevel automation 
Organisations wanted to automate multiple workflows rather than just isolated output points. For example, whereas the original GenAI allowed a user to write an email response, the Agentic AI can perform multiple automation functions, including analysing the ticket, determining what has been done previously, updating the CRM, initiating a workflow and sending a response all by itself.

Need for predictable and goal-oriented AI 
GenAI is powerful, but passive; while Agentic AI is proactive. Most important to keeping business operations resilient and more reliable are autonomous agents taking action toward known goals: "minimise churn," "reduce SLA delays," "optimise cost." 

Conclusion:  
Eventually, it is not Generative AI but Agentic AI that characterises the future. The 2026 message is clear: businesses need AI that doesn’t just talk, but acts. Agentic AI is a major leap forward, enabling faster scaling, leaner operations, and more resilient innovation than traditional GenAI ever could.  

The Year 2025 was A Significant Year in the Transition To Order. The year of acceleration before 2026. And the organisations that will deploy Agentic AI today will define the future of intelligent enterprise operations. 

-- Mohar V, Co-founder & CEO, TECHVED.