AI agent
An AI agent is a system that uses a language model to plan and take actions toward a goal, calling tools, APIs or other steps rather than only returning text. Agents can automate multi-step workflows, but they add reliability and oversight challenges that production engineering has to handle.
Where a plain language model answers a question, an agent decides what to do and then does it: search, call an API, run a calculation, check the result, and try again. That makes agents powerful for multi-step automation.
It also makes them harder to ship well. An agent that can take actions can take wrong ones, so the engineering effort moves toward guardrails, evaluation and observability, the same MLOps discipline that separates a reliable AI feature from a risky one.
