AI agent

Where a chatbot waits for your next question, an AI agent takes a goal and works toward it independently. It decides the steps, calls the right systems or APIs, reads the result back and determines the next action. A human sets the goal and the boundaries, the agent does the work in between.

The difference from a standalone AI tool lies in that acting on its own. A language model writes an email when you ask it to. An agent reads an incoming request, looks up the customer in your CRM, checks the policy, drafts the reply and queues it for sending, as a continuous process.

That makes agents powerful and at the same time something to deploy with care. An agent that genuinely changes something in your systems needs clear boundaries, logging, and a human keeping watch in the right places. See also human-in-the-loop and agentic workflow.

In practice we rarely build agents in isolation, but as part of a layer over your existing systems. You can read what that looks like at AI agents and AIOS.