Software Engineering defined the last half-century of computing. The next decade belongs to Agentic Engineering™ — the discipline for building intelligent, autonomous, and trustworthy systems that can think, reason, and act.

Agentic Engineering succeeds and extends Software Engineering. It establishes the principles, methods, and standards for designing, constructing, and governing intelligent software agents.
While Software Engineering codified the practices for deterministic programs, Agentic Engineering advances the discipline to encompass autonomous, adaptive, and goal-directed systems capable of reasoning, perceiving, and acting within complex, dynamic environments.

The discipline defines the foundation for engineering agentic systems across three grades of rigor:

• Production-grade — ensuring robustness, reliability, security, observability, and orchestration for agents deployed in real-world operations.

• Enterprise-grade — enabling scalability, governance, interoperability, lifecycle management, and integration into mission-critical ecosystems.

• Regulatory-grade — advancing compliance, auditability, safety, alignment, and trustworthiness for regulated domains such as healthcare, life sciences, and finance.

Through its layered Agentic Stack, maturity models, and professional practices, Agentic Engineering provides the frameworks and governance required to ensure AI agents are engineered with the same rigor, accountability, and predictability that Software Engineering once brought to traditional applications—while enabling a new generation of cognitive systems that operate safely, reliably, and at scale within economic, societal, and regulatory boundaries.