AI Agents Explained Without Hype, From The Ground Up
AI agents are Big Data and Data Science in 2013 all over again. Everyone talks about it, but they all think different things. This causes marketing and sales challenges.
AI agents have a huge communication problem.
Everyone’s talking about them—but few can explain what they actually are, let alone agree on a definition. It’s Big Data in 2013 all over again.
This confusion slows down innovation and sales, since people aren’t on the same page.
And there’s largely three main reasons for this confusion.
First, people are talking about AI agents at different conceptual levels. Some describe AI agents as AI “employees”. Others say agents are smarter workflow automations. Wall Street Journal thinks they are “autonomous bots”. Meanwhile, OpenAI and Anthropic have slightly different definitions of agents. This is confusing and frustrating.
Second, most people simply don’t get why we need autonomous software—let alone what it actually means to give software autonomy in practice. So all these definitions? They’re flying way over people’s heads.
Third, there is too much hype on the technology, and not on concrete use cases. Especially, no one’s talking about when NOT to build AI agents. It’s basically like the early days of “data science” - people can’t understand why they need to bother. Plus, every automation company repositioned themselves as AI agent companies, so buyers are confused about how AI agents differ from automation.
So today, I will take a different approach. We will start from scratch, assuming almost nothing, without the buzzwords, and get clear on AI agents.
I will explain what AI agents are from the ground up in plain English (*). Along the way, I will provide my definitions of AI agents, workflows, and other agent concepts.
This post can be used as a common AI agent glossary to align with your customers or colleagues. For a more technical coverage, please see my piece for the AWS Machine Learning Blog on AI agents (2023).
Here, we’ll cover:
What is an AI workflow
What it means for software to be “agentic”
What is an AI agent, and what is not an AI agent
The types of problems you should use AI agents for, and why
The downsides of AI agents