You’ve probably heard a lot of hype about agentic AI recently, and if you’re feeling lost in the noise, you aren’t alone. You might well be wondering, what exactly is agentic AI, what can it do for me as a communicator, and what (if anything) do I need to be doing now?
Believing that an open and curious mindset is the best way to approach AI, we’ve been digging into these questions on your behalf. Below, we’ve outlined our findings. We hope it provides some clarity and helps join up some dots for you.
What is agentic AI?
Agentic AI is a form of AI that can operate autonomously, thinking and acting like a strategic partner rather than simply responding to a prompt. It can:
- Understand and work towards a defined goal.
- Make independent decisions to progress towards that goal.
- Develop and execute a plan to achieve its objective(s).
- Monitor its own progress and adjust its actions to ensure success.
How is it different to GenAI?
Whilst GenAI is an incredibly powerful tool, it can only respond to human prompts. Where GenAI is reactive, agentic AI is proactive. GenAI needs a single instruction to produce its single output, but agentic AI can take initiative. Instead of simply creating, it can plan, monitor and refine work, without constant prompting from us.
How can it help communicators?
Agentic AI can help you deliver your work as communicators in wide-ranging ways. Here are a few examples:
- Crisis management. With so much volatility and unpredictability in the world, horizon-scanning for potential crises events is essential. Agentic AI can autonomously monitor incidents, track evolving events and flag potential crises. Beyond that, it could help draft your crisis comms and adapt messaging based on real-time data.
- Listening and sentiment analysis. Gathering feedback through active listening can be a time-consuming and expensive task for communicators. By plugging into different sources, such as online forums or virtual town hall Q&A data, agentic AI can track employee sentiment for you, identifying themes and specific pain points. This could be particularly helpful during periods of business change or transformation. Going a step further, it could even suggest targeted communication interventions to address identified pain points.
- Personalising the employee journey. Just as we expect our external feeds to be tailored to our preferences, employees want to receive the information that matters most to them. Agentic AI can help with personalisation by tracking individual interests and engagement and proactively delivering tailored comms. This could include suggesting targeted learning materials, providing job-specific resources and notifying them of opportunities best aligned to their job role or career path.
Are you behind on agentic AI?
If reading this has left you worrying that you’re behind, we want to reassure you. While many organisations are planning to adopt agentic AI and are experimenting with the possibilities, SS&C’s Global AI Survey 2025 shows that only 29% of organisations have adopted agentic AI at a significant scale. Of course, that doesn’t mean we can rest on our laurels; now is the time to experiment, learn and develop.
What can you be doing now?
So, what can you do now to move your team forward?
- Keep learning and experimenting. Within the parameters set by your business, encourage your team to keep safely playing with AI. What works well and what doesn’t work so well?
- Have a clear vision in mind. Although often treated as an end in itself, GenAI should be viewed as the means to help us deliver value to our business. Similar to how you’ve approached GenAI, consider where agentic AI could help you most. Are there specific activities that would be best served by an autonomous agent? Where do the biggest potential productivity gains lie?
- Find out what’s happening across your organisation. We know your team doesn’t operate in a vacuum, and a lot of what will be possible is dependent on your organisation. Find out what your business has planned or might be trialling, so you can build a case for how you’ll adopt it in your function. Are there other teams that have been invited to pilot a tool? What can you learn from them?
- Get your house in order. Adopting AI at scale and effectively embracing agentic AI requires clean and safely accessible data and robust tech infrastructure. Use this time now to audit your data and other source inputs. What do you have, and what is accessible? Is it structured in a way that means agentic AI can access it?
- Think about capability building. As one comms leader shared with us recently, having sophisticated tools in place doesn’t mean your people will use them, or use them well. We’re increasingly seeing how limited digital skills are inhibiting progress with AI use. This is the perfect time to think about how you can bolster your team’s skills and capabilities in this area so they are ready to embrace agentic AI when the time comes.
Ready to accelerate AI adoption but unsure where to start? Let us help you. We’re partnering with leading global brands to integrate AI into their comms functions. With our support, you can:
- Pinpoint and close critical knowledge and skill gaps within your team.
- Equip your team with the clarity and criteria to use AI effectively and safely.
- Transition from ad-hoc experimentation to strategic AI adoption.
- Uncover the most valuable AI use cases for your team and demonstrate clear ROI.
- Align your entire function on a unified AI adoption strategy.
- Identify your next steps and likely challenges to ensure continued progress with AI.
Read an example of how we support comms leaders around GenAI here. To explore what tailored support we can provide for your team, contact us at hello@kademygroup.com or call +44 (0)207 157 9787.
