What is an AI Agent?

1. What is an AI Agent?

Hi! And welcome to the course! I'm thrilled to be your host on this exciting journey into the world of AI agents.

2. Course Learning Objectives

By the end of this course, you'll be able to understand the core components that make up an AI agent, distinguish agents from other AI systems you might already know or use, and feel confident using off-the-shelf agentic tools or even, building your own. Now, let’s get started by defining what AI agents actually are.

3. Jeeves: Our Travel AI Agent

To understand AI Agents, let’s start with an analogy. Imagine you're planning a business trip to Tokyo. You’re busy, but luckily, your company is subscribed to an AI travel agent service that can help with your journey. Let’s call this agent Jeeves.

4. Jeeves: Our Travel AI Agent

You type into Jeeves the following: “Jeeves, I’m travelling to Tokyo on June 26 and staying there until July 12. Help organize my trip.”

5. Reasoning and Planning

Because Jeeves understands natural language, he quickly grasps our request. Before booking travels, Jeeves engages in reasoning and planning, figuring out the necessary steps and tools needed to fulfill the request correctly. In this context, Jeeves identifies the following steps: Access your itinerary and calendar, identify where you’ll need to stay based on your meeting schedule, identify relevant flights and hotels, communicate the plan back to you, and finally, organize your travels.

6. Taking Action

Having identified his plan, Jeeves now needs to act. To execute his plan, he can use the tools provided to him. So, he accesses: Your calendar and email to understand your schedule and meetings, documentation related to your company’s travel policy, and finally, Expedia or Booking.com to determine the best flights and hotels. He shares a proposal for the plan with you, and once agreed, books the travel arrangements.

7. AI Agents: Reasoning, Planning, and Acting

In a nutshell, this is what an AI Agent is: An AI model capable of reasoning, planning, and acting on a set of actions by interacting with its environment.

8. AI Agents: Reasoning, Planning, and Acting

You can think of an Agent as having two main parts: 1. The brain: The AI model that handles reasoning and planning. It decides which actions to take based on the situation. 2. The body: Representing everything the agent is able to do, through tools. These systems are agentic, because they have agency, which means they can interact with the real world, using these capabilities and tools.

9. AI Agents: A Formal Definition

Given this, let’s provide a formal definition: An agent is a system that leverages an AI model to interact with its environment to achieve a user-defined objective. It combines reasoning, planning, and the execution of actions (often via external tools) to fulfill tasks.

10. The Spectrum of "Agency"

You might wonder how this differs from prompting a language model or using a workflow automation tool. To understand these distinctions, let’s look at the spectrum of agency when it comes to AI systems. There are systems with no levels of agency. For example, chatbots that can only answer questions based on trained knowledge, or workflow automation systems that can do discrete, pre-defined tasks. One level higher is when an AI model can route scenarios in a workflow, for example, if an AI identifies whether a customer support ticket should go to billing or technical support. One level higher are tool-using agents, similar to Jeeves. These systems can interact with tools, to achieve a user-defined objective. As we go higher, so does the level of agency. Here, we have systems that can perform multiple steps, like Deep Research tools. Or multi-agent systems, that call on multiple agents to work on different tasks simultaneously. The best example of multi-agent systems is coding tools that can autonomously create, ideate, and push code. The more agency these systems acquire, the more "agentic" they become.

11. Let's Practice!

Now that we understand what AI agents are, let’s get started.

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