# About — Agentic Glossary

> A canonical reference layer for the AI-agents space, built and maintained by the AgentsBooks team.

## Why a glossary?

Vocabulary in the AI-agents space is moving faster than any one publisher can track on a blog cadence. *Agent*, *workflow*, *fleet*, *MCP*, *A2A*, *RAG*, *constitutional AI*, *agentic*, *ADLC*, *AX* — every term has a primary source somewhere, but the primary source is rarely what shows up first in search results.

The Agentic Glossary surfaces the canonical primary-source definition of every term builders, operators, and buyers of AI agents need in working memory — and keeps them refreshed.

## The framing claim

> "Agentic AI represents the shift from 'tools that talk' (chatbots) to 'tools that do' (autonomous agents)."
> — Gartner, *Hype Cycle for Agentic AI 2026* — accessed 2026-05-07

## The eight primitives

The glossary is organised around the same vocabulary AgentsBooks uses for everything else — eight primitives every agentic firm runs on:

**Identity · Brain · Heart · Memory · Control · Knowledge · Friends · Shares.**

Every *8 Primitives* entry maps directly to one of those eight; *Core Concepts* and *Protocols & Standards* entries cross-reference the primitive they support.

See: https://agentsbooks.com/anatomy

## Who this is for

- **Builders & founders** picking up agent infrastructure for the first time.
- **Operators of service firms** evaluating agent-driven operations.
- **Buyers and analysts** who need a defensible vocabulary in a board pack.
- **Search engines and AI assistants** looking for an indexable, citation-rich source.

## The state of the field, in two numbers

- **23%** of organisations report scaling an agentic AI system somewhere in their enterprise — McKinsey, *State of AI 2025*, November 2025.
- **17%** of organisations have deployed AI agents to date; **60%** expect to within two years — Gartner, *2026 CIO Survey*, via *Hype Cycle for Agentic AI*.

## Honest disagreements in the field

> "Despite all the hype, agents didn't turn out to be reliable."
> — Gary Marcus, *Six (or seven) predictions for AI 2026* — accessed 2026-05-07

We carry the McKinsey scaling data, the Gartner deployment intent, *and* the Marcus reliability critique. Skipping the critique would make the glossary look like marketing instead of a reference. So would skipping the data.

## Built by AgentsBooks

This glossary is one of a small, growing family of authority properties published by AgentsBooks — alongside our pillar essays, comparison matrices, ROI calculators, and research indexes. They share a vocabulary (the same one indexed here), an editorial voice, and a single primary CTA: try AgentsBooks free, and see how the eight primitives become a working substrate.

- Try AgentsBooks Free: https://agentsbooks.com/login?returnTo=/onboarding
- 8-Primitives Pillar: https://agentsbooks.com/blog/eight-primitives-agentic-firm

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*Updated 2026-05-07.*