1 Simple Explanation for AI Novices Who Want to Understand “What is an AI Agent?”

2025 will be the year of the AI Agent

Most people think that you have to interact with AI manually but that’s not true.

This belief comes from our experience using AI. If you’re like most people, you’ve used AI through some type of Chatbot or some type of tool where you provide an input and the AI produces an output. In all those cases, you interact with AI manually.

AI Agents disrupt this idea.

Here is 1 simple explanation of “What is an AI Agent?”

1 Simple Explanation

AI Agents use the AI’s reasoning capabilities instead of the human’s reasoning capabilities.

1 Simple Example

Imagine a simple workflow to create a blog post that includes 3 tasks: research, writing, and editing.

We can use AI to automate each of these tasks. You can ask AI to search the Internet for relevant articles on a topic. Then you can ask AI to write a blog post based on the articles you have. Finally, you can ask AI to proof read the post before you publish it to your blog. AI automates a lot of this work but there is still manual work. Can we fully automate this?

With Agents, we can.

We can create an Agent for each of these tasks and chain them together. One agent does the research and finds articles. That research agent passes those articles to the writing agent who creates the blog post. The writing agent passes his draft to the editing agent who proof reads the post. If the editing agent has suggestions, it can re-engage the research agent or writing agent autonomously until the post is ready to be published. The only human interaction is at the beginning where we provide the agents with a topic.

AI Agents rely on the AI’s reasoning capabilities to orchestrate the 3 tasks instead of relying on the human’s reasoning capabilities.

Conclusion

AI Agents are magical and scary.

They are magical in the sense that we don’t know how they get the job done but they do. They are scary in the sense that we are giving our control over to AI. As AI Agents continue to evolve, we should expect more complex use cases to be automated using agents and the complexity of how things are done gets abstracted away.

Whether you consider AI Agents magical or scary, AI Agents are the next evolution of AI.