AI Agent
An AI agent is a system that takes a goal, breaks it into steps, and executes those steps autonomously—calling tools, reading results, adjusting course—without a human approving each action. Where a chatbot waits for your next prompt, an agent decides what to do next on its own. The concept borrows from reinforcement learning and robotics, but the current wave runs on large language models that can reason about which tool to use when. Agents are powerful when the task has clear success criteria and bounded risk. They are dangerous when the goal is vague, the environment is unfamiliar, or the cost of a wrong action is high. Most production agent systems today still need tight guardrails and human checkpoints—full autonomy remains more demo than reality.
Related terms:
AI for Marketing
AI for marketing leverages language models, predictive analytics, and automation to accelerate traditional workflows like content creation, audience...
Inference
Inference is the process of running a trained model on new input to generate a prediction or output—such as sending a prompt to GPT-4 and receiving a...
Token
In large language models, a token is the basic unit of text—usually chunks of three to four characters—that the model reads and generates.