What is agentic AI and why is everyone talking about it?

According to the AI overlords, this is the year of agentic AI.You may have seen Google announce its "agentic era" with a web browsing research assistant and an AI bot that calls nail salons and mechanics for you. OpenAI leadership talked about agentic AI being a "big theme in 2025" and has already introduced a research preview of Operator, an agent that can perform tasks on your behalf, and Deep Research, which "conducts multi-step research on the internet for complex tasks." Microsoft just unve