Planning is the step where an agent decomposes a high-level goal ("research competitors and write a report") into a concrete sequence of actions before executing any of them. Without explicit planning, agents tend to make myopic greedy decisions — taking the most obvious next step rather than the most strategically useful one.
Common planning patterns: ReAct (Reason + Act — interleave reasoning and action at each step), Plan-and-Execute (plan the whole sequence first, then execute), and Tree of Thoughts (explore multiple branches before committing). Reasoning models (o1, o3, Claude with extended thinking) essentially do planning as part of their chain-of-thought.
For most production agents, a simple "think before you act" system prompt addition outperforms elaborate planning frameworks. Invest in explicit planning frameworks when tasks genuinely require looking multiple steps ahead — not as a default.
Bring this to your business
Knowing the term is one thing. Shipping it is another.
We do two-week AI Sprints — one term, one workflow, into production by Day 10.