What is an AI agent?
An AI agent is a model wired up to take actions — search the web, call an API, send an email — and loop on the results until a goal is reached.
A plain language model only writes back to you. An agent does work. It is the same model under the hood, but it has been given access to tools — a calculator, a web search, a file system, a database, a calendar — and the ability to decide which tool to use, in what order, until the task is done.
Think of an agent as a small, autonomous worker. You give it a goal. It plans the steps. It uses tools. It reads its own results. It adjusts. It either finishes the job or stops and asks for help.
A few real examples:
- Schedule a meeting across five inboxes by reading availability and sending invites.
- Research a topic by searching the web, opening the top results, taking notes, and writing a brief.
- Triage support tickets by reading each one, looking up the customer, and drafting a reply.
Agents are powerful and they break in interesting ways. The biggest risks are over-confidence (taking actions on bad reasoning), loops (calling the same tool forever), and access creep (an agent doing more than you intended). Good agent design is mostly about giving the model the right guardrails and tools — not about making it smarter.