Agent
nounAn AI that works towards a goal by taking actions in your firm's systems. It chooses its own steps, so nobody can read them in advance.
Before Anne Hughes's annual review, an administrator asks the firm's AI product to update her plan values. Most arrive through the provider feeds, but one old pension is off-feed. For plans like that, the firm's process is to request a current valuation from the provider. The AI finds nothing in the feed. Instead of requesting a valuation, it searches Anne's documents, finds last year's statement and records its value with today's date. In the review meeting, Anne asks why her pension hasn't grown in a year.
The administrator gave the AI a goal, not a list of steps. Recording any value would finish the job, and nothing told it the value had to be current. Choosing its own steps makes it an agent. An agent is an AI that works towards a goal by taking actions in the systems it is connected to. It chooses each next step from what the last one turned up, until it judges the goal met or reaches a limit its product sets.
Many firms run a back-office workflow before each review. It creates the same tasks every time, including a task to request a valuation for any off-feed plan. Anyone at the firm can read those steps in advance. An agent can be given the same job, but nobody can read its steps before it starts, because it chooses them as it goes. They show afterwards only if the product keeps a log.
Not to be confused with
- An automated workflow runs steps that someone wrote in advance, the same way every time. A product sold as agentic may still be a workflow with one AI step in it, such as drafting a summary.
- People call almost any AI product an AI tool. In this dictionary the word means something narrower, and its own entry says what.
- Agent, in this entry, means software. It has nothing to do with an agency code, an agency transfer, a tied agent, or acting as the client's agent under a letter of authority.
- Vendors sometimes sell an agent as an AI paraplanner or a digital employee. It can use only the systems its product connects it to.
Overheard
Where did the agent get Anne's pension value?
From last year's statement, when the feed had nothing. Until our product can be set to stop and ask, I'm checking every value it enters against the document it came from, and that document's date.
Where it sits
Agent
- is part ofHarness
- works withModelAI-nativeToolPermissionHuman review
Copy this entry
Paste it into Word, Google Docs, Notion or Apple Notes. Headings and links come with it.
Sources
Your feedback
Could you explain agent to a colleague now?