An AI agent is software that uses a language model to decide what to do about a request and then carries it out using tools connected to real systems.
The difference from a chatbot, in one example
A customer writes: “I ordered on Tuesday, order 4412, can you send it to my office
instead?”
A chatbot replies with your shipping policy and an address-change link. An agent reads
the order number, checks the order, sees it has not shipped, changes the delivery address,
confirms the new address back to the customer and notes the change on the order. The
customer’s request became an action in your systems. Nobody touched it.
The gap between those two outcomes is tools. An agent has things it can call: look up
an order, check a calendar, send a payment link, book a courier, raise a refund. A chatbot
has text.
What an agent is made of
- A model that reads the request and picks what to do.
- Tools, which are specific permitted actions against specific systems.
- Context, usually retrieved from your own content. See
RAG. - Limits on what each tool may do and when a person takes over.
Where the limits have to live
This is the part that decides whether an agent is safe to put in front of customers.
If your refund ceiling is written in the model’s instructions, it is a suggestion, and a
determined or confused conversation can talk past it. If the ceiling is enforced by the
software that executes the refund, the model can agree to anything and nothing happens
beyond the limit.
So the useful question when you evaluate a tool is not “how clever is the AI”. It is
“where is the rule enforced”. In AeroChat, the merchant sets limits on refund amounts,
discounts, delivery dates and when to hand over, and the system applies them rather than
leaving them to the model’s judgment.
A note on the word
“Agent” is used loosely. Some products call any chatbot an agent. A workable test: ask
what it can change in your systems without a person. If the honest answer is nothing, it
is a chatbot with a new label. There is nothing wrong with a chatbot. It just will not
reduce the work that reaches your team, because the requests that reach your team are the
ones that need something done.
Related terms
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