AI Vocabulary · 05 Agents
What is AI Agent?
A model connected to tools and given a goal, so it can take steps on its own instead of only answering.
An agent is a model wrapped in software that lets it act. It gets a goal, can use tools such as search, files, email or a calendar, looks at the results and decides on the next step, again and again until the task is done or it asks you.
A chat assistant answers. An agent does: it researches a topic across many pages, updates a spreadsheet, writes and tests code, or prepares a report. The term is used loosely in marketing, so ask what the system can actually do on its own.
More autonomy means more speed, and more ways to go wrong. A mistake in step two can carry through ten more steps before anyone notices.
Why it matters for you
Agents can take whole tasks off your plate, not just sentences. The key design decision is where a person checks the work: before anything is sent, paid, deleted or published, keep a human in the loop.
Own it
An agent acts with the permissions you give it. Grant the minimum it needs, keep a log of what it did, and make sure you can stop it.
Where it comes from
"Agent" comes from the Latin agere, "to act", and the idea of a rational agent was borrowed from economics. Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig built their influential 1995 textbook Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach around it, defining AI as the study of agents that perceive and act (Wikipedia). Large language models gave this old idea a new, practical engine.
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