Understand the difference between a chatbot, an assistant, and an agent — and why it matters for your work.
June 8, 2026 · 1 min read
An AI agent is a program that receives a goal, plans the steps to achieve it, and executes real actions in the world — without you needing to be present.
A chatbot responds. An agent acts.
When you tell a chatbot "summarize this document", it returns the summary. When you tell an agent "every Monday summarize the sales report and send it to the team on Slack", it does it on its own, week after week.
An agent has three fundamental parts:
Modern language models are capable enough to reason about complex tasks and decide what to do at each step. That makes it possible to delegate real work — not just questions and answers.
Read How to create your first agent to get started in under 10 minutes.