Agentic AI vs. AI Copilots: What's the Difference?

Intro

AI-driven automation carries the potential to transform everything we know about customer service – with AI Agents that can deliver fast, responsive customer service experiences without the need for human intervention. 

When deployed for internal use, AI Agents become advanced AI Copilots that can help steer your employees to massive productivity gains by handling mundane tasks and providing fast, intuitive solutions during every customer interaction. 

Where AI Copilots are primarily assistive and aimed at solving specific problems within a customer service workflow, a new technology will transform AI interactions on both the customer and employee-facing sides.

That technology is known as Agentic AI, a term that describes a more dynamic form of AI Agent that can understand language, determine requirements, map out solutions, and then take action autonomously – all without human interaction or the need to perfectly model each process. 

Far from replacing humans, however, Agentic AI will actually fuel the next generation of AI Agent that can directly support your team. With Agentic AI on their side, human employees will be able to get instant assistance during cases and devise novel solutions that speed up tasks and improve productivity.

In this new world, will more assistive AI Copilots still have a role, or will Agentic AI become a core part of every Copilot solution? Let’s take a closer look…

What Is an AI Copilot?

AI Copilots take many forms, but the term primarily refers to assistive AI tools that harness Conversational and Generative AI. These tools support users (your human agents) in performing their roles more efficiently. 

Agent Copilots are integrated with your existing technology stack and can help your human employees become more productive across many areas, including:

• Transcribing calls and creating automatic summaries saves your agents time and effort while maintaining data privacy and compliance requirements.
• Identify customer queries and present answers to agents live during the call.
• Provide real-time translation that allows customers and agents speaking different languages to find common ground.
• Recognize changes in customer sentiment to help human agents steer calls back toward positive outcomes. 

These use cases all help demonstrate that the core purpose of an AI Copilot is to assist employees with their day-to-day processes. Non-Agentic AI Copilots are:

• Assistive: AI Copilots are designed to augment workforces by assisting with specific tasks and challenges, listening in on calls and automatically capturing transcripts and creating summaries. Though many of the tasks they perform can be done autonomously, a non-Agentic AI Copilot still relies on direct human oversight to function effectively.
• Customizable: Copilots operate on rule-based guidelines, but these rules can be rigorously customized to suit the needs of your team and their working processes. 
• Connected: AI Copilots are integrated with your backend tools and systems to provide optimal support. For example, being able to look up the answer to a customer question in your internal knowledge base and then use Generative AI to provide a factual response that your human agent can convey to the user, without having to place a customer on hold and search for an answer themselves. 

They are also connected with other AI Agents in your business. Thus, an AI Agent can field the initial portion of a customer’s call, and when it is handed over to your human team, the AI Copilot is immediately aware of all of the data and details of the case so far.

What Is Agentic AI?

Agentic AI is a transformative technology that accelerates an organization's capacity for automation. It is capable of autonomous decision-making, meaning it can break a target outcome down into tasks, execute them, and solve problems without ever requiring human input or a flowchart-like process.

Agentic AI is not specific to AI Copilot technology and can be applied to both internal and externally-facing systems. It is commonly associated with AI Agents, as it creates more autonomous ‘bots’ that can handle direct interaction without the need for oversight. 

Though Agentic AI does require some initial prompt-based training, it can ‘learn on the job’ as well as useto short and long-term memory, which means it can adapt and grow within any role you assign it to.

The most important element of Agentic AI, when it comes to augmenting your human workforce, is the ability to map and carry out tasks without intervention, which means it can take care of laborious processes immediately during a customer call, saving the agent time and effort.

Agentic AI’s features include:

• Autonomous: Agentic AI can employ dynamic reasoning to plan and execute tasks, which means it can operate without human intervention – though it does allow for predefined boundaries. 
• Adaptive: Agentic can interpret data and adjust actions based on feedback or the current context – highly valuable for Agent Copilot systems used on live customer calls. 
• Strong memory: Utilizing both short- and long-term memory means Agentic AI is capable of understanding past customer interactions and taking personalized actions. 

Agentic AI is not used on its own. It is effective when paired with other forms of AI, such as NLU-driven Conversational AI, to create a fully realized AI Agent. Though many applications of said AI Agent are customer-facing (such as an Agentic AI customer experience chat agent), the power of Agentic AI can also be turned inward to create more effective AI Copilots.

What Is The Key Difference Between Agentic AI vs AI Copilots?

The main differences between Agentic AI and AI Copilots comes in their intended scope of use. Where AI Copilots can act on your decisions to assist with specific challenges, Agentic AI can make them on its own to intuit and innovate across every area of your team. 

AI Copilots are designed to assist with specific tasks and allow for increased productivity and efficiency in predefined areas. Agentic AI represents a fundamental change in how AI Agents operate and will revolutionize how internal workforces leverage AI to improve their working lives. 

Here’s a table that helps demonstrate the differences between the two.

In many ways, analyzing the differences is a waste of effort because we expect that Agentic AI will soon become a core part of AI Copilots for every organization.

Agentic AI makes AI Copilots more proactive – able to anticipate user needs, propose solutions to your human agents, and even take the initiative to automatically complete tasks without requiring specific prompts. All of this means your human team can be fully focused on the customer call whilst your Agentic-driven AI Copilot can create transcripts, analyze sentiment, update CRM details, etc. 

There will, however, still be some straightforward use cases such as creating call summaries that justify traditional AI Copilots. 

If you’re interested in other comparisons that help demonstrate the unique direction of Agentic AI, read our Agentic AI vs Generative AI article to learn more. 

Why Choose Agentic AI?

Agentic AI is changing everything organizations know about AI Agents, including Copilots used for internal support. Agentic AI is a pivotal technology that gives your Copilots a new level of utility. These changes include: 

Reactive to Proactive

Without Agentic AI, AI Copilots are largely reactive based on user prompts and pre-defined task workflows. With Agentic AI, they can now anticipate user needs, propose actions, or take initiative to perform tasks autonomously without requiring explicit prompts.

Enhanced Contextual Awareness

Agentic AI enables copilots to better understand the broader context of a task or project, which improves their ability to deliver relevant and actionable solutions. In a customer contact center, this could translate to an AI Copilot that can identify changes in customer sentiment during a call and then offer tailored, personalized support to the human agent to help keep a customer happy. 

Better Autonomy

Before Agentic AI, AI Copilots (and AI Agents in general) were reliant on predefined workflows and were best when trained and deployed for a specific task. With Agentic, AI Copilots become more dynamic and can action their way through complex multi-step processes without user input or modeling. 

Continuous Improvement

Utilizing Agentic AI means AI Copilots can learn and adapt over time, evaluating the outcomes from every action they take and using that information to make changes. This makes for a continuous evolution that further improves the experience for your human workers.  

Greater Scalability

By improving the capacity of AI Copilots to assist human agents, Agentic drives productivity improvements across your business. With human teams able to get cases resolved faster and with fewer errors, issues, or post-call wrap-up time, you will save time and money and be able to scale further growth.

Why Choose AI Copilots?

Though Agentic AI will be utilized in advanced AI Copilots, there are still use cases where a task-based system will be the better option. Agentic AI’s autonomy and proactivity aren’t a necessity in tightly regulated processes such as insurance claims, where a more controllable AI Copilot would help keep agents on track and remain compliant with privacy and data laws.

Agent Copilots, both with and without Agentic AI, are incredibly valuable for augmenting your existing team and allowing it to scale to meet the complex demands of modern consumers. By providing tools like live translation and call summarization, they take much of the manual burden from your human workers and reduce costs associated with other solutions, such as outsourcing to translators.

The Future of Contact Centers Is Agentic AI & AI Copilot

In just a few short years, AI has already rapidly evolved from its first iterations and become a commonplace technology within enterprise organizations. Just as Generative AI was once a new but invaluable tool, Agentic AI offers transformative advantages to those who embrace it.

Rather than having your human employees worry about AI ‘replacing’ them, you can provide an intuitive AI Copilot that supports them in doing their jobs more efficiently and removes much of the burden associated with mundane, repeatable tasks. This, in turn, makes your employees happier and more productive. 

However, as with any technology, getting things right is paramount to success. Work with an expert AI provider to ensure your AI Agents are suitably equipped to meet the requirements of your organization, whilst also meeting the needs of your employees. 

Get started with Cognigy AI Agents

Cognigy specializes in AI Agents built for enterprise organizations that want to improve their customer service processes and scale toward a better future. You can learn more about the role of our AI Agents in this Agentic AI vs AI Agents guide. 

For internal workflows, our AI Copilot feature is purpose-built for the needs of contact centers and helps save time and money for your most valuable resources. 

With composite behavior, you can have the best of both worlds with both Agentic AI and non-Agentic AI Copilots built for specific tasks within your team. Book a demo today to see how we can make it happen.