Agentic Artificial Intelligence for Smart Grids: A Comprehensive Review of Autonomous, Safe, and Explainable Control Frameworks

Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is emerging as a paradigm for next-generation smart grids, enabling autonomous decision-making, adaptive coordination, and resilient control in complex cyber–physical environments. Unlike traditional AI models, which are typically static predictors or offline optimizers, agentic AI systems perceive grid states, reason about goals, plan multi-step actions, and interact with operators in real time. This review presents the latest advances in agentic AI for power systems, including architectures, multi-agent control strategies, reinforcement learning frameworks, digital twin optimization, and physics-based control approaches. The synthesis is based on new literature sources to provide an aggregate of techniques that fill the gap between theoretical development and practical implementation. The main application areas studied were voltage and frequency control, power quality improvement, fault detection and self-healing, coordination of distributed energy resources, electric vehicle aggregation, demand response, and grid restoration. We examine the most effective agentic AI techniques in each domain for achieving operational goals and enhancing system reliability. A systematic evaluation is proposed based on criteria such as stability, safety, interpretability, certification readiness, and interoperability for grid codes, as well as being ready to deploy in the field. This framework is designed to help researchers and practitioners evaluate agentic AI solutions holistically and identify areas in which more research and development are needed. The analysis identifies important opportunities, such as hierarchical architectures of autonomous control, constraint-aware learning paradigms, and explainable supervisory agents, as well as challenges such as developing methodologies for formal verification, the availability of benchmark data, robustness to uncertainty, and building human operator trust. This study aims to provide a common point of reference for scholars and grid operators alike, giving detailed information on design patterns, system architectures, and potential research directions for pursuing the implementation of agentic AI in modern power systems.