Talking Supply Chain: Explaining Agentic AI

The world of artificial intelligence is changing fast—too fast for some to keep up. Businesses that just three years ago were exploring how to implement AI saw a quick pivot in 2023-24 to learn all about Generative AI. Welcome to 2025, and while Gen AI is still in its infancy, it is quickly being overwhelmed by the excitement of Agentic AI.

But, there are a lot of buzzwords surrounding AI, and Agentic AI is just the latest. Kevin Frechette, co-founder and CEO of global autonomous sourcing platform provider Fairmarkit, joined the Talking Supply Chain podcast to talk about the latest AI trend.

“The words will get tossed around way too much over the next 6 to 12 months,” he said. “You’ll hear people say Agent AI, AI agents, Agent Networks, Agent Layers, and Agent Architecture. So just get ready for a bunch of buzzwords. I think one way to do it is to start to break down.”

Interested in being a guest on Talking Supply Chain?

 

The Talking Supply Chain podcast dives into the hot topics and trends facing supply chain professionals with leaders from top companies and academia. If you know someone you believe would make a good guest, reach out to Supply Chain Management Review Editor-in-Chief Brian Straight at [email protected].

 

Here are some past episodes you may like:

 

Talking Supply Chain: Genpact’s Anderson talks tariff strategies

Talking Supply Chain: Will Visibility-as-a-Service enable full supply chain transparency?

Talking Supply Chain: Putting Gen AI into action

Talking Supply Chain: How J&J’s Luis Roman views digital transformations

 

Frechette made a comparison to a three-layer birthday cake. The first layer is the data, the second layer is the AI algorithms that produce predictable, consistent outputs. The top layer is the Agentic AI layer, which is running tasks with minimal human supervision.

“Think about a difference between an agentic workflow and just a normal workflow with Gen AI,” Frechette explained. “[In] a normal workflow with Gen AI, you might go to chat GPT and say, write a paper on this topic and whatever the topic is, it’ll write the paper. It’ll take a little bit of time, and then you can interact with it. So then you’re giving it further directions of how you want it refined. Where in an agentic workflow, an example would be to write an outline on this topic, do some research, write a first draft, consider what needs to be revised, research that, and then rewrite it and continue that process. You’re giving it the instructions to then go take different actions.”

During the conversation, Frechette dove into some real-world use cases for Agentic AI, and talked about what the future has in store for artificial intelligence.

Listen to the full conversation today.

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