AI agents are a type of artificial intelligence (AI) system that can understand and respond to customer enquiries without human intervention, and produce consistent and predictable outcomes.

“There is no universally accepted definition on what is an ‘agent’, declared Kate Charlet, Global Director for Privacy, Safety, and Security, Google LLC. From Google’s perspective, the important aspects is the capability to reason from the user perspective, planning ability and autonomy.

AI agents can work across systems and many steps ahead, take into account the environment etc. It is a multi-step process where the new feature is autonomy. Users can ask an agent to do something on a more complicated level, for example produce a detailed travel itinerary according to their preferences. The agent breaks this vague plan into several tasks and starts the research. It can also change the way it is planning during the process, Charlet said.