Gen AI vs. AI Agents vs. Agentic AI—finally, a visual that makes sense!

Why this matters?

Throughout 2025, the mainstream narrative about AI agents was a few months behind the actual capabilities.

In mid-2025, the term “agentic AI” took off. Early definitions framed it as systems that could plan, decide, and execute goals with minimal human supervision.

The problem:

Reality lagged that framing. Reliable autonomy wasn’t there yet.

In June 2025, agents still couldn’t reliably handle more than 2-3 tool calls. This was visible in the Agent Leaderboard by Galileo (screenshot in the comments).

By late 2025, agents became reliable in scoped workflows, once hallucinations dropped and planning, instruction following, tool use, evals, guardrails, and recovery matured.

And I'd argue that everything we've seen with Claude Code over the past two weeks (it's been wild) is just the beginning.

AI engineers often talk about “harness.” You can think of it as a safety and control layer around a model.

A Stanford paper from December 5, 2025 (arXiv:2512.05765) argues that the real leverage are not LLMs but the orchestration layer you ship: how you coordinate multi-agent systems so they stay grounded and correct.

My translation:

• RAG for grounding

• Context engineering for guiding

• Tools for action

• Verification loop for correctness

• Guardrails for safety

• Memory, scratchpads, and task lists for continuity

• Roles for separation of concerns

• Governance for accountability and control

Jaana Dogan (Principal Engineer at Google) in her January 3 post on X noticed:

"𝘗𝘦𝘰𝘱𝘭𝘦 𝘤𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘰𝘵 𝘵𝘦𝘭𝘭 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘧𝘧𝘦𝘳𝘦𝘯𝘤𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘮𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘭𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘮𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘭𝘴+𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴."

𝘉𝘦𝘤𝘢𝘶𝘴𝘦 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘵𝘪𝘯𝘤𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘣𝘦𝘵𝘸𝘦𝘦𝘯 𝘮𝘰𝘥𝘦𝘭𝘴 𝘢𝘯𝘥 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘨𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘳𝘦 𝘣𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘣𝘭𝘶𝘳𝘳𝘺 𝘨𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘯 𝘸𝘩𝘢𝘵'𝘴 𝘶𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘢𝘵𝘩 𝘪𝘴 𝘮𝘰𝘴𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘰𝘱𝘢𝘲𝘶𝘦 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘤𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘯𝘵. 𝘐 𝘦𝘹𝘱𝘦𝘤𝘵 2026 𝘵𝘰 𝘣𝘦 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘧𝘰𝘤𝘶𝘴𝘦𝘥 𝘰𝘯 𝘣𝘶𝘪𝘭𝘥𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘳𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘳𝘯𝘦𝘴𝘴𝘦𝘴.

If you’re waiting for “the next model” to unlock value, you’re already late.

The biggest gains in 2026 won’t come from raw model upgrades. They’ll come from better orchestration, clearer intent, tighter evals, and teams who know how to design systems around AI, not just call APIs.

Start building. Stop theorizing. We're just starting.

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Big thanks to Brij kishore Pandey for this amazing infographic. Finally someone made sense of the "agentic AI." I loved it. Source: linkedin.com/posts/brij…

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2026 is here. The leverage shift has begun.

My summary of what actually changed in AI (AI coding, ARC-AGI-2) and what PMs should focus on next. No email, no paywall: productcompass.pm/p/ai-…

I also recommend the AI PM Certification. It’s a 6-week cohort by Miqdad Jaffer (Product Lead at OpenAI). I lead AI Build Labs. Next cohort: January 26. $500 off: bit.ly/aipmcohort