AI Agent
An AI agent is a system that plans and carries out a multi-step task across a company’s tools, rather than answering one question and stopping.
The word covers a wide range in practice. At the simple end, an agent is a model with a few tools attached, running one action at a time. At the other, it is a system that breaks a goal into steps, decides which tool each step needs, checks the result and adapts when something fails. What makes it an agent rather than an assistant is that it is measured on whether the work got done, not on whether the answer was good.
The hard part is rarely the model. An agent that is going to act inside a company needs to know what it is allowed to touch, which system holds the truth for a given fact, and where a person has to sign off before it proceeds. Those are questions about context and governance, not about reasoning, which is why an agent is only as useful as the layer it sits on.