Agentic AI vs. Generative AI: What’s the Difference for Businesses?

You've heard a lot about AI, and that it saves time for you and businesses that are integrating it in their operations get a significant return on investment.

Even Microsoft says that for every 1 dollar spent, Generative AI technology generates 3.7 times ROI. The returns can be significantly higher for top leaders.

But is that an end to AI? No, a new tool has evolved which is more powerful than Gen AI.

Unlike Generative AI, this new super smart assistant doesn't just write content, but it plans, takes actions, and has a thinking brain that helps in designing autonomous workflows.

But this is just the beginning. Let's dive into this blog to understand the nuts and bolts of Generative AI and Agentic AI (adaptable systems) in detail.

What is Generative AI?

Generative AI, as the name suggests, generates information based on the type of prompt you provide to the model. These systems are trained on large datasets to produce content, and it can be text, music, or images.

This emerging technology has different modalities, meaning the output you get comes in different forms. It can be text-to-text, text-to-image, text-to-audio, and text-to-video.

There are other modalities as well, where you give an image to the model and it will give you an image as output.

Business Value for Organizations

It can do more work in less time. Like Marketing teams can do their creative work and generate engaging copy.

For developers, it's a blessing as they can write their code in a faster way, fix bugs, and generate piles of documentation.

Limitation

Limitation? It can't execute things or take action independently.

Hence, Generative AI = Reactive (content on demand, no autonomy)

What is Agentic AI?

Agentic AI goes beyond generating content. It's autonomous AI that can plan, decide, and act across tools and systems. Instead of waiting for prompts, it takes goals and executes them.

Examples: Tools like n8n, Crew AI, LangChain, and Microsoft Copilot Agents show how Agentic AI can orchestrate multi-step workflows across CRMs, ERPs, or APIs.

Business Value that Agentic AI Creates for Enterprises

Consider an Agentic AI as an AI assistant for enterprises that will take you from point A to point B by adding value to your life. The value generation can either be saving hours or reducing costs.

Think of it this way: if Generative AI is your assistant drafting notes, Agentic AI is your Chief of Staff who runs the project, makes calls, and gets results.

What makes Agentic AI different from Gen AI? Agentic AI will plan and make decisions as they have access to tools such as APIs, CRM, ERP, or any other analytics platform.

Tools can be anything. For example, if they want to predict the weather of a place, then the Agent will call the weather API to provide them with the real-time weather info. This is just one example.

Limitation

But the hard truth is that the brain behind a working of agentic AI is LLMs. If LLMs don't have language understanding, then agents can't plan, make decisions, or take multi-step actions to help you accomplish your business objectives.

How Generative AI is Different from Agentic AI?

Here are the key differences between Generative AI and Agentic AI-

Business Applications of Agentic AI

For businesses, 2025 has become the "year of agentic AI". It can be found in almost every industry, be it healthcare, manufacturing, marketing, banking, finance or human resources.

Let's discuss the practical use cases of how businesses can use Agentic AI

1. Agentic AI for Human Resources

Companies are now turning to AI-powered smart agents for speeding up their recruitment tasks. Initially, what used to take days and weeks for recruiters can now be done in a few minutes.

Integration of AI agents in recruitment workflows makes the recruiters' job easy. It scans hundreds and thousands of resumes each day, calling those candidates, scheduling their interviews, and rescheduling their interviews if they're unavailable.

They go beyond traditional keyword search patterns and rather look for other factors such as whether the candidate can be a good cultural fit for the organization or match their preferred communication style.

Advantage for Recruiters

It handles early candidate screening, allowing recruiters to focus on employee development and performance planning

But it's never about replacing recruiters, it's about making the recruitment process fast and flawless.

2. Agentic AI in Marketing

For many marketers, analyzing the past campaign data feels like a never-ending job where you have to see what went wrong and then find areas for improvement for the next quarter or year.

But agentic AI helps marketing teams analyze what will happen next like if the engagement is going to drop for the next week. This AI agent will spot the risks before they happen so marketers can adjust their campaigns.

But this is just the start.

Then, what these agents do for marketing teams?

It tracks the competitor strategies and identifies the shifts in customer behavior so marketers can make data-driven decisions in real-time.

Instead of relying on preset rules, Agentic AI will create micro-segments and then personalize those campaigns as per customer behavior.

Hypothetical Scenario

Breeze AI agent by HubSpot helps thousands of businesses to grow their audience and convert leads.

• The agentic AI understands your business in and out, uses your existing customer data, and helps your marketing team to come up with engaging content that perfectly align with your brand goals.
• Makes prospecting easier by simplifying when and how to reach prospects and draft the personalized emails for them.

3. Agentic AI for Finance

Just like how AI agents are used in other industries, in finance, it's changing the way how financial institutions serve their customers.

A study from Forrester states that VPs of financial services said that they've deployed 60 AI agents till now, and they're planning to integrate 200 more agents.

In the area of investment analysis, financial institutions spend hours in doing analysis of market conditions, assessing risk, and report preparation.

But integration of AI agents augments financial processes by doing real-time market analysis, auto-generating detailed reports, and helping decision-makers take decisions quickly.

What makes these AI agents different from chatbots?

These Agentic AI workflows shift the focus from "to assist me" to "do it for me" approach. What a mere AI chatbot analyze the customer balance to suggest a savings plan.

But an AI agent takes one step ahead by analyzing the customer's account, creating a savings plan, and then adjusting the strategy accordingly.

As the bank was dealing with millions of data points, accessing data manually to extract relevant insights was a time-consuming job. But the agent introduced efficiency in the process by making the most out of structured data.

Result? The agent can now generate insights, has memory of past interactions, knows when to loop in the human, and makes services available to clients.

He further said – Compliance officer is the 5th fastest-growing job in the US. Majorly, banks have hired 307 compliance officers for doing KYC work alone; they can't hire more people.

But deploying AI agents automated 95% of their backlog cases and reduced the customer waiting time from 20 days to merely 2 minutes.

Best part? These AI agents were trained to comply with the existing SOPs and are more accurate than humans.

4. Agentic AI in Healthcare

Traditionally, diagnosing the patient requires more time, plus having relevant patient info is crucial to see what tests are needed to perform.

With the advancements of Artificial Intelligence and Machine learning, healthcare agents analyze the genomics and clinical data to design personalized healthcare plans for them.

Result? Improves the health of patients.

One study states that by 2025, 180 zettabytes of data will be generated and only 2% of the total data is in use. Most of the time, physicians and doctors had to manually sort through huge datasets.

And this problem multiplies in every field, be it oncology, cardiology, and neurology.

That's why intelligent AI agents are built to digest complex datasets (clinical trials, patient medical history, and lab results) to spit out actionable insights and to help doctors make accurate decisions, and ensuring that patient data is protected at the same time.

Instead of oncologists reviewing the clinical data manually, the integration of multiple agents in healthcare can solve this problem. Here, every agent can interact with each other to get the work done.

Like a clinical language processing agent can be developed for analyzing clinical notes and coordinating with MRI schedules.

While an optimization agent can schedule patient appointments, and the third agent can create personalized treatment plans.

At the University of Health Center in Florida, clinicians understand that post-surgical recovery requires extraneous care from the doctor's side.

A lung transplant patient is transported to a smart ICU room where sensors and cameras continuously monitor patient's facial expressions and physical movements before any symptoms will emerge.

The AI agent will monitor not just whether the patient is on the bed, it will observe whether room light is enough or disturbing the patient. Is the patient still in pain?

Result? Instead of waiting for input, the healthcare agent will predict the signs of symptoms or any discomfort before the patient reports such issues.

Business Applications of Generative AI

Let's talk about use cases of Generative AI technology -

1. SEO-Optimized Content

What used to take hours for content creators and businesses to generate SEO-optimized content can now be done in a few minutes.

With the help of Gen AI tools, you can create personalized blogs, website copy and email content that not only engages users but also drives leads.

Since these Gen AI models are multimodal, this means they can produce content in different media formats such as text, images and videos.

A study from eMarketer states that 93% of marketers are worried that AI can lose tone and not produce quality content. At the same time, they realize that for scaling content production, AI is a blessing for them.

Illan Nas, Chief Revenue Officer, shares his insights on creating high-quality videos using Google's Veo 3 model.

This means it's not just saving money; it's also about who iterates faster will win in the long term.

2. Code Generation

There's a saying that AI makes good engineers better and bad engineers worse, but does that mean you should stop using AI to generate code? This is just a half-told story.

One of the most obvious use cases of Generative AI tools for programmers is that they speed up the development process. It can be in terms of writing code, generating complex documentation, or debugging programs.

Good Part? With the emergence of low-code and no-code tools in the market it makes coding accessible to all, even if you lack technical skills.

To name a few, Generative AI tools that are popular in the market: GitHub Copilot, Tabnine, IBM Watsonx Code Assistant, to get more work done in fewer hours.

• GitHub Copilot can be integrated with IDEs, giving coding suggestions and auto-completing code for you.
• Similarly, IBM Watsonx Assistant can help you speed up your coding work. You don't need to write every line of code manually. Instead, you can get the desired output by giving a simple prompt to the model or feeding in your existing code.

3. Generative AI for Education

Generative AI in education is not just helping students improve their learning outcomes but also encouraging teachers to improve their teaching methodologies.

Whether it's designing personalized learning materials, summarizing research material or automating administrative tasks, AI does everything.

Generative AI for Healthcare

With the rising demand for personalized healthcare and growing amounts of medical data, there comes the need for Gen AI healthcare applications.

This technology has multiple use cases, ranging from summarization of vast amounts of data from patient logs to developing advanced healthcare tools and assistants that provide personalized care to patients.

These AI-powered tools are a blessing for doctors and medical professionals, as they can answer patient questions, simplify doctor appointments, and monitor symptoms of illnesses.

Furthermore, medical chatbots enhance the effectiveness of treatments by assessing symptoms, providing next steps that patients can take, and in some cases, notifying medical staff when intervention is needed.

Which One to Use for Your Business: Agentic or Generative AI?

Use Generative AI for areas like:

• Generating social media posts, product descriptions, and marketing material in minutes, not weeks
• Providing speedy customer support such as auto-generation of responses to FAQs
• Accelerating the development process by writing codebase and testing scenarios

Deployment Advantage – Faster to deploy and comes at a lower cost

Use Agentic AI when:

• The team wants to automate their entire workflow
• Making decisions independently with minimal human intervention
• Your business goal is outcome automation, not task automation

Hypothetical Scenario

You've been given the business objective of creating a launch campaign for XYZ product, this is the target audience, and these are the KPIs.

The AI agent does everything from researching the target audience to writing copy to running campaigns and monitoring results.

ROI Calculation

In this case, ROI = time saved/year + number of tasks automated + saved cost of hiring employees

That results in your annual savings.

How BigOhTech Can Help You Build the Right AI Model for Your Business

To help you make the right choice for your business, it's not about choosing agentic AI over generative AI. It's more about figuring out which AI to use for solving a series of tasks.

• Generative AI is great at generating content and suggesting insights.
• Invest in Agentic AI if you want to create an AI system that can plan, take action, work based on goals to create value in users' lives (saving time or helping businesses save money).

As an AI agent development company, we help you create autonomous systems that can double your sales and reduce costs.

Best part? BigOhTech's agentic AI developers fully understand your business before figuring out which type of agent you need. They don't just create products; they keep users at the forefront.