AI in Business

Chatbot vs. Agentic AI: A Manager's Guide

Understand the crucial difference between a tool that answers questions and a system that gets things done.

A Simple Analogy: The Intern vs. The Project Manager

Understanding the difference between a GenAI Chatbot and Agentic AI is simple if you think about two types of helpers you could hire.

🤖 The GenAI Chatbot is like a brilliant, fast intern.

You give it a specific, one-off task, and it completes it instantly. It's reactive—it won't do anything until you ask. Its core function is to generate content on demand.

  • "Draft an email for me."
  • "Summarize this report."
  • "Write some code for this function."

🧑‍🚀 The Agentic AI is like an autonomous project manager.

You give it a high-level goal, and it independently plans, acts, and uses its own tools to achieve it. It is proactive and can operate over time without constant human input.

  • "Monitor our top 10 clients and send a personalized follow-up if they haven't logged in for 2 weeks."
  • "Manage the new employee onboarding process."

Business Use Cases of GenAI Chatbots

GenAI chatbots excel at content creation and completing discrete tasks. Common use cases include:

  • Drafting Content: Writing emails, reports, marketing copy, and social media posts.
  • Summarization: Condensing long documents, articles, or meeting transcripts into key takeaways.
  • Answering Questions: Acting as a powerful search engine or knowledge base for internal company information.
  • Code Generation: Assisting developers by writing snippets of code or debugging existing code.

Business Use Cases of Agentic AI

Agentic AI is used to automate complex, multi-step business processes that require decision-making and adaptation. It shines where you need a system to act independently to achieve a goal.

  • Finance: Agents can autonomously monitor transactions for fraud, automate credit-risk memo generation, and manage customer onboarding checks.
  • Supply Chain: An agent can manage the entire supply chain, automatically rerouting shipments and resolving exceptions without human intervention.
  • Healthcare: Agentic systems can automate clinical workflows by updating patient records from multiple sources in real-time.
  • Customer Support: An agent can triage support tickets, find answers in the knowledge base, and only escalate to a human when necessary.
  • IT & HR: Agents can resolve technical issues for employees, screen resumes, and schedule interviews.

The Bottom Line

A GenAI chatbot is a powerful tool you operate. An Agentic AI is a powerful system you delegate to. Often, an Agentic AI will use a GenAI chatbot as one of its tools to complete a task, like drafting an email as part of an automated follow-up sequence.