What is agentic AI? Inside Teneo’s real-world automation approach with Anne Jenkins

Everyone's slapping 'agentic' on their AI products, but what does that even mean? Anne Jenkins, Vice President of Solution Architecture at Teneo, helps us separate substance from buzzwords. In this episode, Anne shares her expertise on agentic AI and the evolution of conversational AI technologies. We explore what truly makes an AI ‘agentic’ versus the marketing hype all over your LinkedIn feed and beyond. Anne explains why Teneo's hybrid approach, combining traditional NLU capabilities with large language models, creates more reliable, cost-effective, and latency-friendly solutions than pure LLM implementations. We also discuss the challenges organisations face when adopting AI solutions, including the misconception that LLMs alone can solve all problems without proper conversation design or business rule integration. Anne shares valuable insights on how companies can prepare for AI adoption through education, competitive pilots, and architectural considerations. We touch on many best practices when it comes to implementation, with Anne emphasising the importance of proper context engineering, state management, and dynamic prompting. Chapters 00:00 - Meet Anne Jenkins 05:01 - AI is now a boardroom conversation 06:48 – OpenAI’s agentic AI platform 08:48 – What is an AI agent? 21:38 – The hybrid AI model or end-to-end LLMs 26:49 – AI in debt collection 34:55 – How Teneo helps implement agentic AI 42:39 – Context engineering 47:19 – State management and LLMs 55:40 – How Teneo designs AI experiences 01:00:32 – Demo – teaching Teneo something new 01:10:26 – How businesses should adopt AI 01:16:44 – What sets Teneo apart Show notes Check out Teneo Follow Anne Jenkins on LinkedIn Read Kane’s article - What agentic AI actually is: a deeply researched and definitive explanation Follow Kane Simms on LinkedIn Take our updated AI Maturity Assessment Subscribe to VUX World Subscribe to The AI Ultimatum Substack Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.