Glossary AI technique

AI assistant

What is an AI assistant?

An AI assistant helps a person with a task, such as writing, searching or summarising, but takes no actions by itself unless the user asks.

Also known as AI assistantcopilotchat assistant

ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot and Claude are well-known examples. They make individual employees faster, but the person keeps doing the work and deciding. That is how an assistant differs from an AI agent, which carries out tasks in your systems by itself.

An assistant only becomes truly valuable when it knows your company’s knowledge. With RAG you let it answer from your own documents, with the source attached.

See also Microsoft Copilot.

Last updated: 4 October 2026

Relatedterms

Read on in the glossary

All terms

AI techniqueAI agentAn AI agent is software that pursues a goal on its own: it plans the steps, uses tools or systems, checks the result and adjusts course, without a human directing every step.AI techniqueMicrosoft CopilotMicrosoft Copilot is the AI assistant Microsoft has built into Word, Excel, Outlook, Teams and other 365 apps, for writing, summarising and searching.AI techniqueRAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)RAG lets a language model first retrieve the right documents from your own sources and base its answer on those, so it draws on your knowledge instead of only its training.AI techniqueAgentic workflowAn agentic workflow is a process in which an AI agent, not a human, plans the steps, calls tools, checks intermediate results and continues until the goal is reached.

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