Agent
Working definition
A system you can give a job to, not just a question. It works out the steps itself, uses the company's knowledge and tools, acts within the authority you wrote down, and comes back to you when it is stuck or done. Against a chatbot: a chatbot answers, an agent acts. Against automation: automation follows a script, an agent chooses the steps. An agent can be given a job, and the responsibility for doing it. It cannot be given the accountability: a person answers for the outcome.
Origin. Wooldridge and Jennings (1995) define an agent by autonomy, social ability, reactivity and pro-activeness. Anthropic (2024) separates agents, which "dynamically direct their own processes", from workflows on "predefined code paths". (Michael Wooldridge, Nicholas R. Jennings (1995); Erik Schluntz, Barry Zhang (Anthropic) (2024))
How I use it. Mine adds what a company needs and those definitions leave out, written authority and who answers.
Not to be confused with
- Assistant or copilot: helps a person do a task inside a tool; the person holds the job.
- Workflow: fixed steps decided in advance; the agent chooses its own.
Example. If I ask a model what our cash position is, that is a chatbot. When an agent builds the cash flow from the books and proposes which bills to pay, it holds a job.
On this site
- Why a firm?
- Why a human?
- Why this boundary?
- The banks are blocking AI agents. I let one in.
- Built by AI stopped in April. The agents didn't.
- It took my AI team 17 hours to reinvent middle management
- Built by AI: the first six posts, as reported
- Where nullfte began
- Who does the work, who may decide, who answers for it?
- What would count as evidence?
- The jobs so far