What is an AI agent?
An AI agent is software you hand a goal to instead of a list of steps. It reads what just came in, picks its own next move, does it, checks the result, and repeats until the work is finished or it stops to ask you. Most products sold as agents are still following steps a person wrote.
What an AI agent actually does
Give an agent a goal, like "answer new refund requests and escalate anything over $500", and it works out the steps itself. That is the whole difference, and it is the part vendors blur. The agent looks at what just came in, picks a next move, does it, checks what happened, then goes again. It stops when the job is done or when it reaches a checkpoint where a person has to approve.
The test that separates agents from rebranded chatbots
Ask one question: who decided the order of the steps? If a person drew the steps in advance and the software follows them, that is a workflow, even if every box in it uses AI. Anthropic draws the same line, describing workflows as predefined paths and agents as systems that direct their own. OpenAI is blunter, listing simple chatbots, single-response prompts and text classifiers as things that are not agents. Gartner polled more than 3,400 organizations and counted roughly 130 vendors with real agent capability out of the thousands claiming it, a habit it named agent washing.
When you do not want one
Agents cost more per run than a fixed workflow, and they will not do exactly the same thing twice, so a job with 6 predictable steps is usually better built as a workflow. Gartner expects more than 40% of agent projects to be cancelled by the end of 2027, mostly over cost and unclear value. Reach for an agent when the input is messy and the right next step changes case by case: a refund that needs a judgement call, a lead that needs research first, an invoice that does not match the order. If the steps never change, build the workflow.
Last updated: May 20, 2026