AI Agent

An AI agent is a program that uses a language model to decide what steps to take toward a goal, then carries them out by calling real tools — sending email, querying a database, updating a CRM — rather than only returning text.

The distinction that matters is between generating and doing. A chatbot produces an answer. An agent is given a goal and a set of tools, and it chooses which tools to call, in what order, reacting to what each one returns. Ask an agent to "chase the three overdue invoices from last month" and it queries the accounting system, identifies which are overdue, drafts a message per client and sends them.

That autonomy is also the risk. Every step an agent takes is a decision it might get wrong, and errors compound: a wrong record fetched at step one produces a confidently wrong email at step four. Production agents are therefore built with tight tool permissions, a hard cap on how many steps they may take, and human approval before anything irreversible — sending, paying, deleting.

Agents are also slower and more expensive per task than a fixed workflow, because each decision is a model call. If the steps are always the same, an agent is the wrong tool.

Why it matters

Agents earn their cost on work that varies every time and needs judgement — triaging support tickets, qualifying leads, handling exceptions. For work that follows the same path every time, a deterministic workflow is cheaper, faster and easier to debug.

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Related terms

Workflow AutomationWorkflow automation connects the tools a business already uses so that an event in one triggers actions in the others without anyone re-typing data — …Tool Use (Function Calling)Tool use is a model's ability to call external functions — look up an order, send an email, query stock — by returning a structured request that your …Human in the LoopHuman in the loop means an automated process pauses for a person to approve, correct or reject before it continues — typically before anything irrever…Large Language Model (LLM)A large language model is a system trained on very large amounts of text to predict likely continuations. That single ability underlies writing, summa…

More in AI Automation & Agents

Workflow AutomationLarge Language Model (LLM)RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)EmbeddingVector DatabaseHallucinationHuman in the LoopGuardrailsTool Use (Function Calling)Model Context Protocol (MCP)PromptTokenEvalsIdempotencyWebhookAPI IntegrationAI Voice Agent

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