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!

What Are AI Agents?

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 ...