System Design: Agent vs AI Agent

I see you’ve built a chatbot in your previous company. Was it an AI Agent or Agentic AI? How would you differentiate the two?

Asked in the Technical interview stage. The interviewer used the candidate's own resume project, a LangChain chatbot, as the basis for the question.

Explain the distinction as a practical system design discussion. Describe the architecture of your chatbot, identify whether it qualifies as an agent or agentic system, and explain what you would change to make it more autonomous and reliable. Cover:

1. Control flow, planning, memory, tool use, and autonomy.
2. The boundary between deterministic workflows and agentic behavior.
3. Model, retrieval, tool-routing, and response-generation components.
4. Online serving, latency, observability, and fallback behavior.
5. Evaluation, safety, authorization, prompt injection, and failure modes.