Artificial Intelligence of Things as a Foundation for Agentic AI Systems: Architectures, Applications, and Challenges

The evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has reached a critical point, where agentic AI systems demonstrate strong capabilities in goal formulation and planning but remain difficult to deploy in real-world settings due to their limited grounding in physical environments. These limitations arise from the challenges of partial observability, actuation uncertainty, and strict resource constraints that characterize the physical world. This survey argues that the Artificial Intelligence of Things (AIoT) provides the necessary foundation to embed agentic intelligence into such environments by enabling continuous interaction between sensing, reasoning, and action. We analyze the synergy between goal-driven agentic AI and distributed AIoT infrastructures and present a unified taxonomy of AIoT-enabled agentic architectures, highlighting trade-offs across centralized, edge-native, and hybrid deployment models. The survey further examines key enabling technologies, including edge intelligence, semantic communication, digital twins, and trust mechanisms, and discusses how they integrate into cognitive control loops. Through representative applications in smart cities, industrial automation, healthcare, and energy systems, we show how this convergence moves automation beyond rule-based behavior toward context-aware autonomy. Finally, we identify open challenges related to long-horizon safety, resource-aware intelligence, and ethical governance, and outline research directions toward robust, trustworthy, and socially embedded autonomous systems.