AI Agents: Capabilities and When to Use Them
Explore the core capabilities of AI agents, including autonomy, memory, and tool use, to understand how they differ from assistants. Learn to evaluate when to use agents for multi-step workflows with bounded risk, how to coordinate specialist agents, and incorporate human approval to manage business risks effectively.
An AI agent is a system that pursues a goal by deciding and carrying out a series of steps with some autonomy. In the complaint backlog case, leadership proposes an agent that reads a complaint, checks policy, decides compensation, and issues a refund. That proposal changes the decision from selecting an AI output to delegating business actions.
An assistant usually responds to a request or drafts content for a person to review. An agent can plan steps, use approved business tools, and act within defined limits. Its core capabilities are autonomy, tool use, memory (the working context that tracks the task so far), communication with other agents, and orchestration.
For the complaint workflow, tool use could mean consulting a knowledge base for the current refund policy, retrieving customer history from a customer relationship management system, or submitting a proposed refund to the refund system. Each added action creates a new business risk boundary, especially when money, customer treatment, or policy exceptions are ...