Agentic AI is Creeping Under Generative AI’s Massive Hype

Agentic AI is different than your typical generative AI tool. It is a fully autonomous system that doesn’t wait for prompts. It does all of its thinking, decision-making, and executing actions actively as things happen.

Now, with what seems to be the next huge leap to smart systems (that simply detect changes and run preprogrammed responses), one would think that investment is going to be crazy here. But nope. The generative AI hype remains in full swing, even in 2025. In fact, thirty-four percent of companies are planning to drop at least $10 million on AI this year, up from 30% last December 2024.

Most business entities are still betting on improved versions of current AI tools, even as agentic AI gradually positions itself to pull the entire rug from under them.

AI or Bust – Never a Kodak or Nokia Moment No More

There is currently a big, fat $320 billion in combined investments in AI technologies just this year. Amazon is one of the biggest, sitting at $100 billion. Each player did not want to be behind in a race where everyone thinks generative AI is the next meta. And yes, this also includes startups. For example, generative AI was responsible for nearly two-thirds of all fundraising deals during the first half of 2025.
Indeed, generative AI has already proven its worth across text, images, video, and code, much to the chagrin of the relevant professionals. Scaling it up becomes the natural, logical thing for all of these corporate entities. To be left behind, is to potentially be the next Blackberry.

However, bubble metrics are starting to kill the moment. Like, something of $104 billion raised versus only $36 billion in exits, as mentioned by the same report that discussed AI-based fundraising deals. To make matters “worse,” all that money keeps flowing into just bigger versions of what already works, or extending functions to encroach on the territory of other related apps.

Just look at the latest updates of most Large Language Models (LLMs). Everything is about “enterprise” versions now. Making sure deals are available for groups of people. Integrating mainstream productivity apps. Free platform multi-utilities. And the tangential improvements equated by even more massive spending just get bigger and bigger each year.

Agentic AI is Then Poised to Usurp, Despite Imperfections

While everyone’s scaling generative AI, agentic AI represents what should have actually been the next step to smart reactions: smart (independent) actions. As introduced earlier, this type of AI doesn’t just generate content; it theoretically does all the stuff from an entire workflow from the ground up, and reacts to unexpected changes on the fly.

This complete autonomous task integration is what makes analysts confident that the agentic AI market is projected to reach $10.41 billion in 2025. Sure, it looks super modest compared to the wacky generative AI spending standards of Microsoft and Google (who seem to want to shove it into everything). But it still represents a 56.1% compound annual growth rate. Plus, the headway is already tangible. Organizations using agentic AI are already achieving a 35% reduction in decision-making time and 42% improvement in resource allocation.

In any case, there is enough confidence in agentic AI, even in its current form, that it already warrants considerable investment. The basic premise makes perfect sense. If AI can already understand complex instructions, generate accurate responses, and interact with software systems, the next logical progression is connecting these capabilities to work independently. You know, instead of stopping for human approval at every decision point.

Autonomy also shows up in creator pipelines because high-volume studios want packaging, localization, and distribution handled without a producer touching every step. An agent ingests prompts, renders, captions, and performance data, batches variants, writes tags, drafts thumbnails and copy, schedules drops; and spins up A/B tests across storefronts, end to end, on its own.

The same scenario scales adult creators, too: if the asset is AI generated nudes, the agent keeps style consistent across scenes, exports the right aspect ratios for each platform, adds multi-language voice and captions, tunes dynamic pricing tiers, and cross-posts with affiliate tracking, then learns from watch-time and conversion to plan the next release. That is the point of agentic AI here: not more content, but continuous, self-directed operations.

Businesses juggle different operations within their businesses. As such, they want a clear technical pathway from current AI capabilities to true autonomous operation. Though, to be fair, a lot of this optimism also stems from the thought that AI will eventually handle complete routine workflows without constant human oversight.

Needless to say, based on this “pre-emptive strike” principle, the most obvious place where agentic AI invades first is the customer service industry. And by 2029, many experts are even confident enough to speculate that agentic AI will resolve 80% of customer service issues.

Why The Industry is Blindsiding Itself to Agentic AI

So… why overlook agentic AI if it could potentially be that good? Well, it looks like companies aren’t really viewing the choice in the first place. Heck, most don’t even recognize agentic AI as a distinct evolutionary path yet.

Many industry leaders generally report positive ROI from AI, and based on their current longevity, we can already assume that a considerable portion of this is beyond the initial hype. They are doubling down because the gains are pretty immediate, as generative AI is indeed still very useful despite its flaws. This causes agentic AI to fall to the wayside, since, to non-tech-savvy business folk, they are already investing in the “same” thing.

To make matters worse, many vendors engage in what is called “agent washing.” That is, introducing regular AI tools as if they are agentic AI, which muddies the waters. Think of the former Builder.ai scam, but one step up the ladder. One cannot imagine the frustration of an investor not familiar with the intricacies of AI to be part of Gartner’s 40% statistic of cancelled fake agentic AI projects.

And what about those knee-deep in the agentic AI waters? Well, the investments do seem modest. But based on the reports earlier, they seem to genuinely think that workflow automation is a completely different ball game than mere content generation. Or maybe it is just as bad as in the generative AI side, where the game is to displace human labor as fast and as reliably as possible.