Glossary — Tools
AI agent
An AI agent is a language model given tools and permission to use them on its own, so it can carry a task through several steps.
2 tokensAIagent
Simply put#
An ordinary chatbot answers. An agent acts: it searches, reads a file, calls an API, checks the result and tries again until the job is done.
Example#
"Find this company's financials and write a summary" — the agent queries the registry, reads the report, writes the summary. Three steps, one instruction.
Why it matters to you#
An agent does more, but it also goes wrong on its own. Wherever a mistake would be expensive, a human belongs in the loop.