What exactly is an AI agent?
A chatbot answers a question. An AI agent does more: it carries out a series of steps on its own to complete a task. It fetches data from your systems, assesses it, and prepares an answer, document or action. A language model such as GPT or Claude is the "thinking" part. The rest is ordinary software: integrations, rules and checks around it.
That last part matters. A good agent is mostly ordinary, reliable software, with AI only where it truly adds something.
What is an AI agent good at?
- Reading and sorting text. Reading emails, quote requests or forms and pulling out the right details.
- Summarising and explaining. Summarising a report, a conversation or a set of figures in plain language.
- Drafting a first version. Preparing a reply to a customer question, a quote or a report for a colleague to review.
- Sorting and routing. Recognising an incoming question and passing it to the right person or team.
- Repetitive research. Checking the same sources every day and reporting what has changed.
What can an AI agent not do well (yet)?
- Reliable arithmetic. Language models can copy numbers wrongly or make them up. Leave the calculations to ordinary software.
- Decisions with big consequences. A credit decision, a dismissal or medical advice belongs with a person.
- Working without a fixed process. If you cannot explain how a task works yourself, an agent cannot do it either.
- Always being right. An agent can sound convincing and still be wrong. Checks remain necessary.
How do you stop an agent from making mistakes?
You cannot rule out mistakes entirely, but you can limit them. What helps:
- 01Give the agent only the data it needs, and no more.
- 02Let ordinary code do the calculations, and the AI only explain them.
- 03Check the output automatically, for example whether every number in the text is correct.
- 04Let a person decide on anything that goes outside or costs money.
- 05Log what the agent does, so you can trace what happened afterwards.
Where do you start?
Pick one task that comes back often, takes a lot of time and goes roughly the same way each time. Think of processing requests, a daily report or answering frequent questions. Measure how much time it takes now. Then build a first version in which a person reviews everything, and give the agent more room only once it proves to work well. Also check where your data goes: where possible, choose AI services that process data in the EU.
In summary
- An AI agent carries out a task in steps on its own; most of it is ordinary software.
- Strong at reading, summarising and drafting; weak at arithmetic and decisions with big consequences.
- Start with one repetitive task, do not let the AI do the maths, and let a person decide.
Frequently asked questions
A chatbot answers questions in a conversation. An AI agent carries out a task on its own in several steps, such as fetching data, assessing it and preparing a document.
That depends on the set-up. Give the agent only the data it needs, choose services that do not use your data for training, preferably processing in the EU, and record it in a data processing agreement.
Usually not. An agent takes over the repetitive part of a task, so staff keep time for work that needs their knowledge and judgement.