AI Agent
Definition
An AI system that can autonomously plan, make decisions, and take actions to accomplish goals, often using tools and interacting with external systems.
AI agents represent a significant evolution beyond simple chatbots, moving from reactive question-answering to proactive goal completion. An agent typically has access to tools (web search, code execution, APIs, file systems) and uses an LLM as its reasoning engine to plan multi-step tasks, execute actions, observe results, and iterate. Frameworks like LangChain, AutoGPT, and Claude's tool use enable agent development. Agents can book travel, conduct research, write and debug code, manage workflows, and interact with software on behalf of users. Key challenges include reliability (agents can make compounding errors), safety (actions may have real-world consequences), and cost (complex tasks require many LLM calls). Agents are expected to be the primary way humans interact with AI systems in the future.
Related Terms
Tool Use
The ability of an AI model to interact with external tools and APIs — such as web search, code inter...
Large Language Model
A neural network with billions of parameters trained on massive text datasets, capable of understand...
Chain of Thought
A prompting technique that encourages AI models to break down complex reasoning into intermediate st...
Prompt Engineering
The practice of crafting effective instructions and inputs for AI models to elicit desired outputs, ...