What Are AI Agents?

The last century in the history of computing has had many notable  milestones: the invention of the computer; the development of the  personal computer as we know it; the internet; the smart phone; machine  learning; and cloud computing. Every few decades it seems societies are  thrust forward, riding the wave of some new computational innovation. If  you are reading this, then congratulations (or I’m sorry?), you are  living during another one of these milestones in computational  advancement.

Artificial intelligence (AI) agents, as powered by large language  models (LLMs) and the user data they are provided, have emerged in  recent years as powerful new tools in humanity’s computational  repertoire. But what are AI agents? And how can we be so certain AI  agents will be so impactful? Readers of this report will not only learn  the answers to these questions but will also be exposed to such insights  as when to use AI agents and, critically, how to get started!

So, before we get ahead of ourselves, what exactly are AI agents, and  why should you want to learn about them in the first place? AI agents  are tools designed to allow users to interact with LLMs to achieve a  more productive or creative workflow as seamlessly as possible. Before  AI agents, users would be forced to build their own statistical language  models—a time-consuming, technical, and expensive endeavor! Now, with  AI agents, users who want to interact with AI simply get to log in to an  ...