What makes an AI system "agentic"?

A reactive AI tool waits. You open it, give it a task, it responds, then it stops. That covers maybe 20% of the work an engineering team actually needs done.
An agentic system operates on goals, not commands. You tell it what to watch - a codebase, a support queue, a data pipeline, an operations workflow - and it decides what to do, does it, evaluates the result, and decides what to do next. When something is worth flagging, it flags it. When something needs to be updated, it updates it. It does not wait to be asked.
The practical difference: a reactive tool helps the person at the keyboard right now. An agentic system covers the work that no one is actively doing - the ticket queue building up overnight, the compliance gap accumulating between audit cycles, the monitoring that lapses under delivery pressure.
