What are AI Agents?

You’ve heard of AI assistants, now enter AI agents.

We’re at a tipping point in generative AI adoption. While many companies are succeeding with today’s AI assistants, emerging AI agents will complement the work of assistants and transform how humans and AI work together in the enterprise, enabling AI to tackle more sophisticated tasks.

What are they? AI agents are systems or programs capable of autonomously performing tasks on behalf of a user or another system by designing its workflow and utilizing available tools. The power of agents lies in advanced planning and reasoning – with the ability to collaborate with other agents and connect to external tools.

Imagine you’re an actor with both an assistant and an agent. Your assistant will act on your requests, but your agent will work to maximize your opportunities without instruction. Agents can act off your requests–or prompts–but they don’t need them to do their job. AI agents are proactive, working autonomously to achieve a specific goal by any means at their disposal, by unlocking significant productivity gains and return on AI investments for business.

?? AI agents: Taking initiative

AI Agents and AI Assistants: A Contrast in Function

How Agents Work

Whereas AI assistants need users to provide prompts for every action, AI agents can operate independently after an initial kickoff prompt.?Agents can evaluate assigned goals, break tasks into subtasks and develop their own workflows to achieve specific objectives.

These agents are deployed across various enterprise applications, from software design and IT automation to code-generation tools and conversational assistants. Using advanced natural language processing (NLP) from large language models (LLMs), AI agents comprehend user inputs step-by-step, strategize their actions and determine when to call on external tools.

Benefits of AI Agents

Task automation ??

AI agents?are?AI tools?that can?automate?complex tasks?that would otherwise require human resources. Agents can collaborate with multiple agents, assistants and applications to complete complex, multi-step tasks with just one prompt from the user. Before, users had to provide many specific prompts for each step of that process.

Greater performance ??

Multi-agent?frameworks?tend to outperform singular agents.?This is because the more plans of action are available to an agent, the more learning and reflection occur. An AI agent incorporating knowledge and feedback from other?AI agents?specializing in related areas can be useful for information synthesis.

Quality of responses ??

AI agents?provide responses that are more comprehensive, accurate and personalized to the user than traditional?AI models. This is extremely important to us as users since higher-quality responses typically yield a better customer experience.

Reinventing Productivity

Can AI agents make you better at your job? This autonomous form of AI can do a lot more for you than chatbots, AI assistants and Large Language Models can. In this episode of our AI in Action podcast, Ethan Mollick , Co-Director of Generative AI Lab at 美国宾夕法尼亚大学 - 沃顿商学院 , talks about how to use AI to be more creative and efficient, urging organizations to start adapting to a future that involves working closely with AI agents. ??

Create Personalized AI assistants and Agents to Automate and Accelerate Your Work

IBM watsonx Orchestrate is the enterprise-ready solution that helps create, deploy and manage AI assistants and agents driven by generative AI to automate processes and workflows. It works on top of existing business applications, integrates with any AI model or automation tools, and centralizes AI-powered workflows into one unified experience.

The result? Less manual effort, faster decision-making and greater efficiency across your entire business.

?? Take the next step with watsonx Orchestrate today

Created to help clients build and scale AI agents, our new AI Integration Services can transform end-to-end business processes with agentic AI on their preferred AI and cloud platform.

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Let us help you keep up with the speed of AI. Tune into our AI in Action Podcast to learn how to put AI into practice: ibm.biz/BdKFgN