Why the difference between AI agents and agentic AI matters for product teams
I keep seeing teams conflate AI agents with agentic AI, and this distinction matters more than most realize. One's a contained service; the other's a network of intelligent actors making collective decisions.
Teams keep mixing up AI agents and agentic AI—the difference has real consequences for how you build and govern these systems. The New Stack article uses microservices as an analogy, which helps make the distinction concrete.
An individual AI agent works like a specialized microservice. It handles one job—password resets, log analysis—with some memory and access to specific tools. You can test it, audit it, and understand what happens when it breaks. Agentic AI is a distributed system comprising multiple agents that work together, share memory, and adjust their approaches based on what the others are doing. You're no longer dealing with a single service but a network of decision-makers that influence each other.
The risk profile shifts dramatically. When a standalone agent fails, the impact is limited—your password reset breaks, people can't reset passwords, you fix it. But agentic systems fail differently. That inventory agent feeding data to your pricing agent could create cascading effects you didn't design for. The agents adapt to each other, and their combined behavior produces outcomes that weren't obvious from looking at each piece separately.
We already know how to build distributed systems with microservices, but the governance puzzle here is different. Autonomous agents that share memory and modify their strategies based on the actions of other agents don't fit neatly into standard monitoring approaches. You can audit what each agent does individually, but explaining or predicting what they'll do together gets complicated fast.
Where does this leave you practically? Build single agents first. Learn how they break, how they behave under pressure, what their boundaries are. Then—and only then—connect them into larger systems. Whatever legal and compliance structures you're working with need to address emergent behavior across the system, not just what each component was designed to do.
Janakiram MSV
