A Simplified Guide of AI Agents for Non-technical Professionals
What are AI Agents? The trend of AI agents is taking over a whole industry. It is not often that an entire industry is talking about and adopting the same trend. However, that is what exactly has been happening in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry. Artificial intelligence (AI), when it first started becoming publicly available, wasn’t adopted by many; however, now everyone is using AI—young or old. What started as simple AI assistants now slowly shifts towards autonomous AI agents.
Trends and Evolution of Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Mass Public
Artificial intelligence (AI) for public consumption didn’t start with ChatGPT and AI chatbots.
- Instead, it started with what we now call AI assistants, such as Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, and others.
There were previously other AI tools for public use cases, but they weren’t as popular as AI assistants. For a long time, AI assistants have dominated the market; however, as we know, nothing is forever.
- AI models and AI chatbots quickly took over the world, starting with ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and more.
ChatGPT might be the most widely known, accepted, and used AI chatbot. Even though AI assistants are still being used, most people opt to use AI chatbots due to their generative AI abilities. AI chatbots are powered by generative AI models that give the AI chatbots the ability to create content.
- Finally, transcending AI chatbots are autonomous AI agents such as ChatGPT Operator, Deep Research, and more.
AI agents were the next big step after AI chatbots to achieve artificial generative intelligence. (AGI).
What are AI agents?
After countless web searches and reasoning, we can finally tell you what is an AI agent. An artificial intelligence (AI) agent is a software program that can work autonomously with human interference. Due to their capability of not needing constant human supervision, we call them autonomous AI agents.
What are the Types of AI Agents?
Now that we know what an AI agent is, it is important to know the different types of AI agents. Here are all 7 types of AI agents to keep things simple.
- Simple Reflex Agents: Act solely on current percepts using predefined condition-action rules without any memory of past events.
- Example: A thermostat that turns on the heat when the temperature drops below a threshold.
- Utility-Based Agents: Make decisions by evaluating actions based on a utility function to maximize overall satisfaction or “goodness” of outcomes.
- Example: A recommendation system that selects options based on user satisfaction scores.
- Goal-Based Agents: Operate by setting and pursuing specific goals and planning actions to transition from the current state to a desired goal state.
- Example: A navigation system that plots a course to a specified destination.
- Model-Based Reflex Agents: This type of AI agent improves simple reflex agents by maintaining an internal environment model, allowing them to consider past events and predict future states.
- Example: An autonomous robot that builds a map of its surroundings to navigate more efficiently.
- Learning Agents: These agents improve their performance over time by learning from experiences and adapting their behavior based on feedback and new data.
- Example: A spam filter that gets better at identifying unwanted emails as it processes more messages.
- Hierarchical Agents: Solve complex tasks by breaking them down into simpler, nested sub-tasks organized in a hierarchy, allowing efficient management of layered decision-making.
- Example: A robotic system that plans high-level missions while simultaneously managing lower-level movement and obstacle avoidance.
- Multi-Agent Systems (MAS): Consist of multiple interacting agents that can cooperate, compete, or coordinate to achieve individual or collective objectives in a shared environment.
- Example: Autonomous vehicles communicating to optimize traffic flow and avoid collisions.
AI Agents vs AI Assistants and AI Chatbots
After understanding what an AI agent is and its different types, it is important to know why it is the new industry trend. Why are companies choosing AI agents over AI assistants and Chatbots?
AI Agents vs AI Assistants:
- AI assistants are user-driven, requiring prompts for each task, whereas AI agents proactively complete objectives, starting actions autonomously as needed.
- AI assistants handle straightforward, individual tasks, while AI agents manage complex, multi-step processes, often coordinating with other systems or agents.
- AI agents continuously learn from interactions and adapt their strategies to improve performance over time. AI assistants, on the other hand, have limited learning capabilities, primarily refining responses based on user interactions.
AI Agents vs AI Chatbots
- AI agents are autonomous and can act independently, whereas AI chatbots are straightforward, responding only to user inputs. AI agents have the ability to make decisions, which is something AI chatbots cannot do.
- AI agents can learn from experiences like learning agents, whereas AI chatbots follow and use pre-existing knowledge. You can teach AI agents, and they will learn and adapt from it, whereas AI chatbots will always fall back on the knowledge they were trained on.
- While AI chatbots can now surf the web to extract information, AI agents can interact with websites and web pages. AI agents can also perform tasks on your behalf, like booking tickets, completing transactions, and more, which is something AI chatbots cannot do.
Application and Use Cases of AI Agents
With a brief understanding of AI agents, we can finally understand their applications and use cases. AI agents are autonomous and require no human intervention. AI agents can be applied and integrated into various fields and tasks. There are AI agents for coding, web automation, business operations, app creation, marketing, sales, and more.
Here are a few use cases of AI agents:
- Web App Creation: AI agents like Lovable is like having a full-stack web engineer on your side. The platform can create full-stack applications for you, turning your ideas into a functional app.
- Coding: GitHub Copilot might be the most popular AI agent for coding-related tasks. It can analyze and comment on your codes in real-time and even turn plain language into code snippets.
- Project Management: There are AI agents for project management that allow you to build workflow using AI agents to complete tasks.
- Customer Service: AI agents handle customer inquiries, provide instant support, and resolve issues, improving user experience and reducing response times.
- Web Automation: AI agents for web automation like ChatGPT Operator can interact with the websites, helping to complete repetitive and boring tasks. These AI agents can operate on a virtual cloud browser or on your existing browser.
- Legal Service: AI agents analyze legal documents for relevant information, simplifying legal research and contract analysis by comparing cases and drafting standard legal documents.
- Finance: AI agents monitor transactions for unusual activity, identifying and preventing fraudulent behavior. They can perform trades based on market analysis and optimizing investment strategies.
- Logistics and Supply Chain: Just like there are AI agents for project management, there are AI agents for logistics that can determine the most efficient delivery routes.
- Human Resource (HR): AI agents screen resumes and identify suitable candidates, simplifying the hiring process. They can provide new hires with necessary information and training resources, facilitating smoother integration.
- Education: AI agents can provide personalized and custom educational content to individual student needs, promoting effective learning experiences.
AI agents are not limited to the above-mentioned use cases. There are AI agents for marketing, like WordLift Agent, Humanic AI for email marketing, Dydas AI agent for lead generation.
Conclusion:
We can not predict the future, but we can talk about the present. Autonomous AI agents are the present and could be the future. These AI agents can do what their predecessors could not do. These AI systems work autonomously to complete tasks without much human intervention. We have gone through the 7 types of AI agents, so next time when you use one, you know if the AI tool you are using is an AI agent, and if so, which type. AI agents are different from AI chatbots and assistants and have multiple real-world applications and use cases that you should know.