Agentic AI and Automation · Stage 3
Agentic AI
AI that plans and acts toward an objective over multiple steps, rather than answering one prompt at a time.
Updated · By Paresh Mayani
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Your Complete Guide to AI Technologies, Concepts and Trends
What each AI term means, how the ideas fit together, and the order to learn them in. Plain-language explainers for founders and CTOs planning an AI build, written by the engineers who ship them.
Generative AI is a category of artificial intelligence that creates new content, including text, images, code, audio and video, by learning statistical patterns from large datasets. It is powered by architectures like transformer models, large language models, diffusion models and generative adversarial networks, and businesses use it to automate content workflows, build AI agents and process documents at scale.
According to McKinsey's The state of AI in 2025, 88 percent of survey respondents report regular AI use in at least one business function, up from 78 percent a year earlier.
Source: McKinsey's The state of AI in 2025
02 · The big picture
The definition above, in one picture: the idea, the models behind it, how teams shape them, and what they build with them. Point at a term to see what it connects to.
1The idea
4Putting it to work
5At scale
03 · Learn it in order
The map shows how the ideas fit together. To learn them, read these six stages in order: each one builds on the one before.
Stage 1 of 6 · 4 terms
Written by Paresh Mayani
Start here if you're new to AI. These articles cover the building blocks that everything else is built on.
Up next: stage 2 · Prompt Engineering and InteractionStage 2 of 6 · 4 terms
Written by Lokesh Dudhat and Paresh Mayani
Learn how to talk to AI models effectively in different ways, from basic prompting to advanced techniques.
Up next: stage 3 · Agentic AI and AutomationStage 3 of 6 · 5 terms
Written by Lokesh Dudhat and Paresh Mayani
See how AI systems are growing from reactive chatbots to autonomous, goal-driven agents.
Up next: stage 4 · Core Techniques and InfrastructureStage 4 of 6 · 3 terms
Written by Lokesh Dudhat and Paresh Mayani
Check out which methods and infrastructure make generative AI work in real-time.
Up next: stage 5 · Generative Models and ArchitecturesStage 5 of 6 · 3 terms
Written by Lokesh Dudhat and Paresh Mayani
Dive deep into the model architectures that do the content generation.
Up next: stage 6 · Data and TrainingStage 6 of 6 · 3 terms
Written by Paresh Mayani and Lokesh Dudhat
Understand how AI models are fed, trained, and improved with data.
Path complete
04 · Look it up
Already know the term you need? Every term is defined here in one line.
Showing 24 of 24 terms
Agentic AI and Automation · Stage 3
AI that plans and acts toward an objective over multiple steps, rather than answering one prompt at a time.
Updated · By Paresh Mayani
Read the full explainer →Related
Agentic AI and Automation · Stage 3
A program that takes a goal, chooses a tool, acts, reads the result and decides the next step without being told each move.
Updated · By Lokesh Dudhat
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Data and Training · Stage 6
Confident model output that is not grounded in its source data, and the failure most likely to reach a user.
Updated · By Paresh Mayani
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Agentic AI and Automation · Stage 3
The layer deciding which model or agent runs next, holding shared state and handling retries when a step fails.
Updated · By Lokesh Dudhat
Read the full explainer →Related
Prompt Engineering and Interaction · Stage 2
Assembling the right information into a model's context window before it answers, rather than relying on the prompt alone.
Updated · By Paresh Mayani
Read the full explainer →Related
Prompt Engineering and Interaction · Stage 2
Systems that interpret intent across a dialogue and reply in natural language, holding state between turns.
Updated · By Lokesh Dudhat
Read the full explainer →Related
Data and Training · Stage 6
Expanding a training set by turning existing samples into new variations, so a model generalizes better.
Updated · By Paresh Mayani
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Generative Models and Architectures · Stage 5
A model that generates an image by starting from noise and removing it step by step toward a target.
Updated · By Lokesh Dudhat
Read the full explainer →Related
Core Techniques and Infrastructure · Stage 4
Continuing training on your own examples so a model adopts a task, format or domain it did not learn originally.
Updated · By Paresh Mayani
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Foundational Concepts · Stage 1
A large model pre-trained once on broad data, then adapted to many downstream tasks instead of being trained per task.
Updated · By Paresh Mayani
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Generative Models and Architectures · Stage 5
Two networks trained against each other, one generating and one judging, until outputs are hard to tell from real.
Updated · By Paresh Mayani
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Foundational Concepts · Stage 1
AI that creates new text, images, code or audio by learning patterns from data, rather than only classifying what already exists.
Updated · By Paresh Mayani
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Foundational Concepts · Stage 1
A model trained on vast amounts of text to predict the next token, which is how it produces fluent language.
Updated · By Paresh Mayani
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Agentic AI and Automation · Stage 3
An open standard connecting AI models to tools, APIs and databases through one interface instead of custom integrations.
Updated · By Paresh Mayani
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Agentic AI and Automation · Stage 3
Several specialized agents coordinating on one task, where the coordination and handoff design matters as much as the model itself.
Updated · By Lokesh Dudhat
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Generative Models and Architectures · Stage 5
A model that accepts and produces more than one kind of input, such as text alongside images, audio or video.
Updated · By Lokesh Dudhat
Read the full explainer →Related
Foundational Concepts · Stage 1
Layers of weighted connections that turn an input into a prediction, and the architecture every modern AI model is built on.
Updated · By Paresh Mayani
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Prompt Engineering and Interaction · Stage 2
Designing the instructions given to a model so its output is specific, reliable and repeatable.
Updated · By Lokesh Dudhat
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Core Techniques and Infrastructure · Stage 4
Fetching relevant documents at query time and passing them to the model, so answers are grounded in your own data.
Updated · By Lokesh Dudhat
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Data and Training · Stage 6
Artificially generated data used for training when real data is scarce, sensitive or unbalanced.
Updated · By Lokesh Dudhat
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This blog explains transformer architecture, the neural network design behind GPT, Claude, Gemini, and Llama. It covers how self-attention works, what each block in the diagram does, and the three main model types. It also explains the key limits and how to choose between using, fine-tuning, or building a model.
Updated · By Lokesh Dudhat
Read the full explainer →Core Techniques and Infrastructure · Stage 4
Storage built for embeddings, returning the nearest matches to a query rather than exact keyword hits.
Updated · By Paresh Mayani
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RLHF (Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback) helps AI give answers people prefer. Learn its 3 stages, limitations, and how it compares to DPO.
Updated · By Paresh Mayani
Read the full explainer →Prompt Engineering and Interaction · Stage 2
Giving a model no examples, one, or a handful, to steer its answer without retraining it.
Updated · By Lokesh Dudhat
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Short answers to the questions people ask before they plan a generative AI build.
Jay NandwanaSenior Technical Business Consultant
Need advice tailored to your project?
FAQs cover the common ground. For decisions specific to your tech stack, timeline, and team, talk to Jay and the team, who have shipped what you are planning.
Or email us hello@solguruz.com
Generative AI uses neural networks like transformers and diffusion models, which detect patterns in large amounts of data. This helps in creating new content from a prompt provided by a user.
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