What is an AI agent?
An AI agent is software that uses a language model to carry out a job step by step, using the tools a person would use, inside rules a person agreed. A chatbot answers a question. An agent does the work and reports what it did.
- AI agent
- Software that uses a language model to carry out a job step by step, using the tools a person would use, inside rules a person agreed.
How an agent differs from a chatbot
A chatbot replies to what you type and stops. An agent is given a job, such as sorting the morning inbox, and works through it: it reads, decides, acts in your tools and reports what it did.
That is why an agent needs access to your tools and a set of rules, and why a person stays in charge of anything unusual. See human in the loop.
What an agent needs to work
- A job with rules you can write down.
- Access to the tools the job runs in: an inbox, a calendar, a CRM, a booking system or a phone line.
- A person who checks anything unusual.
- A record of what it did, so the work can be audited.
Examples from our delivery record
- An inbox agent for a hospitality group near Bruges cleared a backlog of about 40 booking emails in one day.
- An agent team inside a law firm's own Slack runs four scheduled jobs, including an inbox watch every 30 minutes.
- An IT consultancy in Brussels has six agents live from the first phase.
What an agent is not
An agent is not a website chatbot and not a decision-maker nobody checks. We build agents that a person stays in charge of.
Where to go next
The three ways we put agents to work are the Personal CEO Agent, job automation agents and the Agent Enterprise.
Related
- What does human in the loop mean for AI agents?Human in the loop means a person approves or reviews what an agent does when the work falls outside agreed rules. How we apply it in practice.
- What are job automation agents?Job automation agents each take over one job, such as inbox triage, follow-up, reporting, research or outreach, and are built one at a time.
- How we build an AI agent in 30 daysKickoff, build on your real cases, a supervised run, then live. How a Phase 1 agent goes from first call to production in 30 days.
- AI agents: questions buyers askPlain answers to the questions buyers ask about AI agents: what they are, what they cost, how long they take and how a person stays in charge.