What is an AI agent?
You increasingly hear about "AI agents" that carry out tasks for you. How do they differ from a regular chatbot?
A regular chatbot like the basic version of ChatGPT does one thing: answer a question. An AI agent goes a step further. Instead of just replying, an agent can also independently take steps to complete a task — for example, looking up a flight, scheduling a calendar appointment, writing and testing code, or clicking through multiple websites to gather information.
The difference lies in what happens after the answer. A chatbot gives you text back and stops there. An agent can then decide for itself: "to finish this, I first need to do this, then that" — and actually carry out those steps, sometimes without you having to approve each one separately. Some agents can even operate other programs as if they were a human at the keyboard.
That makes agents more powerful, but also harder to keep in check. If a chatbot makes a mistake, you read a wrong answer. If an agent makes a mistake while acting independently, that mistake can turn into a wrongly sent email, a wrongly booked appointment, or worse. That's why companies often build in checkpoints, where an agent asks for permission before doing anything irreversible.
For everyday users, the rise of agents means AI is becoming less "a chat window you type into" and more "a digital assistant that handles things for you." Useful, as long as you keep track of exactly which permissions you're giving an agent — the same way you wouldn't hand every intern a key to the office.