I'm Katie Prescott, and this bonus episode of the Times Tech podcast is brought to you in partnership with PWC.

On this podcast, we talk a lot about artificial intelligence, but increasingly the conversation is shifting.

It's no longer just about AI that analyzes information or generates content,

but AI systems that can actually act and action things on your behalf, this next phase is often called agentic AI.

That's technology, essentially, that can make decisions, coordinate

tasks and operate with a degree of autonomy. And while that opens up massive possibilities,

it obviously raises some very real questions for business leaders about trust and safety.

So today we're stepping back from the hype to ask what

agentic AI really means in practice and what needs to be in place for organisations to use it

responsibly and effectively. So I'm joined by Lillia Christophie, who's a partner at PWC,

specialising in AI and data with over 20 years experience in the financial sector.

We're going to talk about how agentic AI is already being applied, why trust is key to its adoption,

and how leaders should be thinking about this technology as part of their long-term growth strategy.

Lillia, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for coming in today.

Thank you for having me.

Should we start with the basics then?

For people who don't know, how do you describe agentic AI?

What is it?

There's a lot of definitions out there about agentic AI.

And typically the easiest one is the wrong one, which is you have

an agent who is invoking a generative and AI engagement through a large language model. So

a human asks a question, it goes to the language model and comes back with an answer. That is not

...