AI Blog: AI Agent Fundamentals

Welcome back to our AI blog series.  Today, we’re diving into the world of AI agents — what they are, how they are different from standard AI tools, and why they are about to revolutionise the way we automate tasks and interact with data.

What is an AI Agent?

AI Agents have become an important evolution direction of AI tools that enables systems to process tasks autonomously, learn from environments and make decisions based upon predefined algorithms or experiences.  Unlike standard chatbots or rule-based automation, AI agents can plan, reason, adapt and even collaborate with other agents.

Instead of regular AI tools, AI agents work as your AI-powered interns or teammates: you assign tasks, and they figure out the steps, find appropriate tools and specific models and get the job done.  Their capabilities expand beyond entry-level tasks, such as summarising articles and sending emails, to scraping product data and auditing financial models.

Why AI Agents are a Transformative Technology

AI agents differ from convention as they do not require prescriptive instructions.  Instead, they can “think” and adapt and plan steps.  The following table summarises what sets AI agents apart from traditional automation:

How AI Agents Work

There are five [5] steps that an AI Agent processes when approaching a task:

1. Set a goal based upon a prompt from the user.  For example, I ask ChatGPT or any other AI tools to find the best-selling laptops under $3000 on Amazon Australia
2. Planning.  AI agents will determine what actions are needed, e.g. searching, scraping and filtering
3. Tool usage.  They may use a browser, write code or call APIs to gather information as needed
4. Reflection.  We need to ask questions to evaluate the outputs.  Ask some questions such as, “did the step work?” or make evaluation referring to the specific scoring criteria.  If not, revise or retry
5. Iteration.  Loop until the final result is improved and meets your expectations.

Where AI Agents are already working

AI agents are already transforming a wide range of industries.  In marketing, AI agents autonomously investigate competitors, capture emerging trends, track pricing fluctuations and support companies to make data-driven decisions in real time.

In customer services, these agents recognise customer needs from complex conversations and offer high-quality, personalised solutions that outperform standard chatbots.  Indeed, this level of AI automation is just the beginning.  In our next post, I will show you how to build your own AI agent with no coding.

Join us next time for more exciting news on AI Agents!