Ambient Agent
An ambient agent runs in the background and acts on a signal — a new email, a finished meeting, a changed record — rather than waiting for someone to type a prompt.
Most AI is pull: a person notices something needs doing, opens a tool and asks. That works, but it caps the value at whatever people remember to delegate. An ambient agent inverts the trigger. It watches a defined set of signals and does the preparatory work before anyone asks, so the output is waiting rather than requested.
The constraint is that an agent nobody invoked has to be far more careful about acting. Ambient work is usually safe to run freely up to the point of producing something — a draft, a summary, a flagged record — and gated at the point of sending or changing anything. Without that split, ambient turns from useful into noise or, worse, into unattended action.