AI agent
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An AI system that can plan, reason, and take autonomous actions to complete tasks. Goes beyond chat to actually do things.
An AI agent is a system that does not just answer questions. It takes actions. It plans. It reasons through multi-step problems. It calls APIs, writes code, searches the web, and executes workflows. A chatbot waits for you to ask a question. An agent goes and does the work.
The distinction matters for marketers because agents change how software gets discovered and purchased. A developer does not browse your pricing page. An agent evaluates your API documentation, checks your rate limits, compares your pricing to competitors, and makes a recommendation. The agent is the new buyer. Your website needs to be readable by machines, not just humans. This shift is what agentic commerce describes.
GitHub Copilot started as autocomplete. Now it is an agent that can plan a code change across multiple files, run tests, and open a pull request. Cursor's agent mode lets you describe a feature in natural language and watches the AI implement it. The trajectory is clear. Agents will do more. Humans will supervise more.
Examples
A developer uses an AI agent to build a feature.
A developer types "Add Stripe payment processing to the checkout page" into Cursor's agent mode. The agent reads the codebase, installs the Stripe SDK, creates the payment form component, adds the API route, and runs the tests. The developer reviews the diff.
An AI agent handles DevOps tasks.
An on-call engineer gets a 3 AM alert about high latency. An AI agent triages the alert, checks recent deployments, identifies a bad database query, suggests a fix, and drafts the rollback PR. The engineer reviews and approves instead of debugging from scratch.
An agent evaluates software for procurement.
A procurement agent compares three API providers. It reads their documentation, tests their endpoints, benchmarks response times, and calculates cost per request at projected volume. It delivers a comparison table. No human visited a single website.
In practice
Read more on the blog
Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between an AI agent and a chatbot?
A chatbot responds to questions inside a conversation. An agent takes autonomous actions. A chatbot tells you how to deploy to AWS. An agent deploys to AWS. The difference is action versus advice.
Related terms
An AI assistant embedded in a workflow to augment human work. Named after GitHub's product but now a generic pattern across industries.
A commerce model where AI agents evaluate, compare, and purchase products on behalf of human decision-makers.
A neural network trained on massive text data to generate and understand language. The technology behind ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini.
Writing instructions that get the best output from an AI model. The difference between a useless response and a useful one.
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