Isn't that just "intelligent"?

We need something to describe a behavioral element in business processes. Something goes into it, something comes out of it - though in this case nondeterminism is involved and it may not be concrete outputs so much as further actioning.

Intelligence is a characteristic.

Volitional, independent, spontaneous, free-willed, sovereign...

No, we need a scientific understanding of autonomous intelligent decision-making. The problem with “agentic AI” is the same old “Artificial Intelligence, Natural Stupidity” problem: we have no clue what “reasoning” or “intelligence” or “autonomous” actually means in animals, and trying to apply these terms to AI without understanding them (or inventing a new term without nailing down the underlying concept) is doomed to fail.

They don’t mean anything precise, and don’t need to. They describe a bag of behaviors with overlapping properties that we observe animals/people doing.

‘Intelligent’ is exactly as precise as ‘funny’ or ‘interesting’. It’s a label for a cluster of observations of another agent’s behavior. It entails almost nothing about how those behaviors are achieved.

This is of course only an opinion, but it’s my professional opinion after thirty five years in the AI business.