Definition
Agentic economy
An economy where autonomous AI agents transact, negotiate, and execute on behalf of businesses.
From the episode “He Buys Companies, Keeps Every Employee, Then Deploys Nobel-Nominated AI”Hear it on the podcast1 episode
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Related terms in Agents & Automation
AgenticAI that takes actions and completes tasks, not just answers questions.Agentic AIAI that acts as an agent: it interprets a goal, plans the steps, uses tools like browsers, code, or APIs, and adjusts based on what happens until the task is done.Agentic AutomationAutomation that uses autonomous AI agents to execute end-to-end processes, including reasoning, decision-making, and self-correction, without scripted workflows.Agentic commerceShopping where an AI agent handles discovery, comparison, and sometimes checkout, rather than the customer browsing a store directly.Agentic FrameworkA software architecture in which autonomous digital agents handle discrete, well-defined tasks within a larger workflow — passing outputs to the next agent, escalating to human review when thresholds are exceeded, and operating continuously without manual triggering. Softheon's average customer runs 1,300 such agent processes. Eugene Sayan filed a patent for agentic frameworks applied to enterprise healthcare applications in 1998 — more than two decades before the current AI wave made the architecture mainstream.Agentic GatewayA middleware layer that sits between AI agents and the external APIs or services they need to call, handling authentication, payment routing, and access control so the agent operator never has to manage individual credentials. Mitchell Jones built Lava as an agentic gateway: install one MCP, load a wallet, and your Claude Code or Codex instance can call financial data, LLM providers, enrichment tools, and blockchain APIs without separate signups or secret key management. The gateway abstracts the plumbing so humans can focus on directing agents rather than provisioning them.Agentic IdentityA cryptographic identity assigned to an AI agent that (a) is distinct from the human who authorized it, (b) is linked to that human authorization through a verifiable chain, (c) is scoped to specific permissions and a bounded time window, and (d) is sealed in a tamper-evident attestation that persists after the agent terminates. Agentic identity solves the firefly problem: AI agents come and go in seconds, but the authorization record must outlive them to enable audit, compliance, and incident response. Jasson Casey's architecture: the authorization chain reads as 'this user on this device with this posture authorizes this agent on this device with this posture, with these permissions, for this period.' Both sides of the chain are cryptographically linked and sealed. Without this, an enterprise buyer asking 'what did your AI agent do and who authorized it?' has no answer.Agentic loopA model running repeatedly toward a validated goal rather than answering a single prompt.