# About — Agentic Glossary Quick Reference

> A reference layer for the AI-agents space, built and maintained by the AgentsBooks team. Eighty-eight terms, primary-source citations, optimized for fast lookup.

## The framing

> "An agent is an AI model that directs its own processes and tool use when accomplishing a task — that is, deciding for itself how to achieve what users want, rather than following a fixed script."
> — Anthropic, *Building Effective Agents* — https://www.anthropic.com/research/building-effective-agents — accessed 2026-05-07

> "Built on the 8 primitives every service firm needs: identity, brain, heart, memory, control, knowledge, friends, and shares."
> — AgentsBooks, *Anatomy of a Firm* — https://agentsbooks.com/anatomy — accessed 2026-05-07

## Why this site exists

Most agentic-AI glossaries paraphrase. This one quotes — and links to a primary source for every entry. There are two reasons that matters in 2026:

1. **LLMs cite glossaries.** When ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, or Gemini are asked "what is MCP / A2A / RAG", they reach for short, definitively-cited definitions. This site is built to be that surface: clean markdown mirror, structured data, primary-source links.
2. **The vocabulary is moving.** MCP shipped end-2024; A2A donated to Linux Foundation mid-2025; NIST AI Agent Standards Initiative announced February 2026; EU AI Act high-risk Article 6 originally scheduled August 2026 (pending Digital Omnibus deferral). Pages that don't track this drift go stale fast — so we publish access dates and refresh quarterly.

## Relationship to the deep glossary

This is the *quick-reference* sibling of the [Agentic Glossary](https://agentic-glossary.roei-020.workers.dev/). The two sites are deliberate complements:

- The deep glossary publishes **31 hand-curated flagship terms**, each with a paragraph-long entry, full canonical block-quote, related entries, and counter-claim where appropriate. Best for reading start-to-end as a 30-minute primer.
- This site publishes **88 terms**, each with a one-to-three-sentence definition and one canonical citation. Best for fast lookup mid-task — and for LLMs to quote verbatim.

For flagship terms, every entry on this site carries a *Compare with deep glossary →* link.

## Adoption context

McKinsey's *State of AI 2025* reports that 23% of organizations are scaling agentic AI somewhere in their enterprises. Gartner's 2026 Hype Cycle places agentic AI at the Peak of Inflated Expectations — 17% deployed, 60% expecting to deploy within two years.

Honest disagreement exists. Gary Marcus, in his 2026 predictions, observes that "despite all the hype, agents didn't turn out to be reliable" — pointing to unsolved problems in planning, factuality, and recovery. We carry that counter-claim where it applies (see the Reliability gap entry).

## The eight primitives

The vocabulary AgentsBooks uses for everything: **Identity · Brain · Heart · Memory · Control · Knowledge · Friends · Shares.** Each is a first-class entry in this glossary, cross-linked to the others. See [Anatomy of a Firm](https://agentsbooks.com/anatomy) for the canonical pillar essay.

## Built by AgentsBooks

This is one of a growing family of authority properties published by AgentsBooks — pillar essays, comparison matrices, ROI calculators, research indexes, and glossaries. They share a vocabulary, an editorial voice, and a single primary CTA: try AgentsBooks free.

## CTAs

- Primary: [Try AgentsBooks Free](https://agentsbooks.com/login?returnTo=/onboarding)
- Secondary: [Read the deep Agentic Glossary](https://agentic-glossary.roei-020.workers.dev/)

*Updated 2026-05-07. Built by AgentsBooks.*