AI agents are supposed to be the next big thing in AI, but there isn’t an exact definition of what they are. To this point, people can’t agree on what exactly constitutes an AI agent. At its simplest, an AI agent is best described as AI-fueled software that does a series of jobs for you that a human customer service agent, HR person or IT help desk employee might have done in the past, although it could ultimately involve any task. You ask it to do things, and it does them for you, sometimes crossing multiple systems and going well beyond simply answering questions. Seems simple enough, right? Yet it is complicated by a lack of clarity. Even among the tech giants, there isn’t a consensus. Google sees them as task-based assistants depending on the job: coding help for developers; helping marketers create a color scheme; assisting an IT pro in tracking down an issue by querying log data. For Asana, an agent may act like an extra employee, taking care of assigned tasks like any good co-worker. Sierra, a startup founded by former Salesforce co-CEO Bret Taylor and Google vet Clay Bavor, sees agents as customer experience tools, helping people achieve actions that go well beyond the chatbots of yesteryear to help solve more complex sets of problems. This lack of a cohesive definition does leave room for confusion over exactly what these things are going to do, but regardless of how they’re defined, the agents are for helping complete tasks in an automated way with as little human interaction as possible.
Full explanation : What exactly is an AI agent?
