What is AI Agent?

Explained

An AI agent is an autonomous software entity that perceives its environment through sensors or data inputs, reasons about the best course of action, and executes actions to achieve defined objectives. Agents can use tools, call APIs, and orchestrate workflows.

Decision guides that use this term

• Build vs buy AI agents: which agents should you own, and which should you rent?
• Agentic AI vs generative chatbots: does your use case need an agent or a good assistant?
• AI agents vs RPA: which one should automate your process, and when should you combine them?
• Microsoft Copilot vs custom AI agents: when is the suite assistant enough, and when do you need your own agents?

Further reading

• Enterprise AI Agents: Beyond Copilots to Your Next Digital Workforce

Related terms

• Agent Agenda The agent’s live plan: ordered steps, open subtasks, and checkpoints toward a goal.
• Agent Planner Component or prompt pattern that proposes multi-step plans before tools run.
• Agent Skill Packaged capability for an agent: instructions, allowed tools, and I/O schemas for one coherent task.
• Agentic AI AI systems that act autonomously, make decisions, and execute tasks in sequence.
• BERT Pre-trained language model that revolutionized NLP; foundation of many semantic search systems.
• Chain-of-Thought Reasoning style where the model spells out intermediate steps before answering.