Why AI agent means something different depending on who’s selling

Homepage > News > Business > Why AI agent means something different depending on who’s selling TL;DR: The term “AI agent” has become one of the most widely used yet least defined terms in technology. Depending on the vendor, it can describe a broad spectrum of capabilities from a tool-using assistant that requires continuous human supervision to a system capable of completing multi-step tasks and executing transactions. Key takeaways: Intelligence and agency are not the same thing. Intelligence is what the AI can figure out, while agency is what it is allowed to do. There isn’t yet a universally accepted definition of an AI agent. Vendors emphasize different capabilities when marketing to agents. Greater autonomy increases the importance of identity, permissions, transaction authorization, and audit trails. Blockchain and distributed ledgers can provide part of the audit infrastructure by creating timestamped, immutable records of decisions, transactions, and events. What matters isn’t the label but the system’s level of agency. While intelligence describes what it can conclude and figure out, agency describes what it is allowed to do. As the agency increases, questions ar...