In a Silicon Valley boardroom, a virtual assistant doesn’t just schedule meetings; it negotiates times, juggles priorities, and aligns schedules across continents, all without a human lifting a finger. Across the globe, in a Shanghai warehouse, an AI system reroutes shipments in real time, dodging supply chain snags before they ripple into costly delays. Yet amid all this automation, there’s a growing illusion of control—as systems become more complex, humans may feel empowered while actually understanding and influencing less of what’s happening behind the scenes.
This is agentic AI: systems designed to operate with autonomy, goal orientation, and a sense of context. It’s the new frontier of artificial intelligence that is practically calling the shots.
Agentic AI represents the next evolution of artificial intelligence. Unlike traditional models that respond to prompts or perform predefined tasks, agentic AI is proactive. It sets subgoals, takes initiative, and acts semi-independently to fulfill user-defined objectives.
In theory, this can dramatically enhance productivity and decision-making. In practice, it may challenge one of our most deeply held assumptions about technology: that we, the users, are always in control.
Table of contents
The Power Behind the Promise
For businesses, agentic AI offers a clear upside. It promises more than speed or scale. Rather, it offers delegation.
Imagine giving an AI agent a broad directive like “plan and launch a product campaign” and watching it coordinate tasks across project management platforms, draft creative briefs, schedule team check-ins, and even trigger customer segmentation in your CRM. What was once the work of multiple team members could soon be managed by a single intelligent system.
This level of autonomy introduces a new paradigm: AI not just as a tool, but as a partner. One that manages details, nudges workflows forward, and even learns from success and failure patterns to optimize over time.
The Lure and Illusion of Control of Automation
But with that power comes a creeping risk: the illusion of control.
The more capable agentic systems become, the more likely we are to defer judgment to them. Research shows that humans could be placing too much trust in AI, even when the outcomes could be unreliable or life-changing.
This effect is compounded when AI acts autonomously. A system that suggests an option is one thing; a system that acts on it can create a veneer of expertise that discourages oversight.
Take a common workplace scenario: your agentic AI schedules a client presentation, pulling from recent email threads, team availability, and prior meeting patterns. It selects a time, books the room, and adds it to everyone’s calendar. But it misses a critical nuance. The client prefers afternoon slots. You don’t find out until they decline last-minute, citing scheduling conflicts.
Was the AI wrong? Yes. But more importantly, were you really in control?
Invisible Decision-Making
The challenge with agentic AI isn’t just errors. It’s opacity. As systems become more complex and autonomous, their reasoning becomes harder to track. These systems often chain together decisions based on a hierarchy of goals and probabilistic reasoning that isn’t immediately visible to the user.
When AI makes a mistake we can trace, we learn. But when it operates behind the scenes, even benign errors become harder to catch and correct.
In high-stakes contexts, such as financial decisions, healthcare diagnostics, or legal risk assessments, this opacity becomes more than inconvenient. It becomes dangerous.
Guardrails, Not Autopilot
So how do we embrace the benefits of agentic AI without sacrificing human agency?
First, we need better UX around explainability. Interfaces should make it easy to inspect an AI’s reasoning and provide override mechanisms.
Second, businesses must define clear escalation thresholds or contexts where human-in-the-loop oversight is non-negotiable.
Third, we need to normalize AI audits. Just as we audit financial systems and cybersecurity protocols, we should regularly review how AI systems make decisions, who they impact, and whether they reflect organizational values and legal compliance.
Finally, we need to resist the urge to equate convenience with control. A seamless experience is not always a trustworthy one. In fact, the smoother the AI performs, the more important it is to question what’s happening under the hood.
Agentic AI is not a threat to human control. Rather, it is a test of it.
As these systems grow more capable, our responsibility is to stay critically engaged. To ask not just, “Is it working?” but also, “How is it working?” and “Who is accountable when it doesn’t?”
True empowerment through AI isn’t about stepping back from the illusion of control. It’s about stepping up.
