What an AI agent is
An AI agent is a program built on a language model that receives a goal and chooses the steps: it reads a document, looks up data, drafts a reply, saves the result. A chatbot answers a question. An agent does the work, often across several systems.
That independence is the benefit and the risk. The more an agent can do alone, the more it matters that everyone knows what it cannot do.
Where an agent helps
Agents work best on tasks that repeat, are based on text and are easy for a person to check.
- First sorting of requests and inquiries.
- Extracting data from documents into a system.
- Drafting replies that an employee approves.
- Collecting information from several sources into one report.
Four guardrails
Write these down before the agent gets access to production data.
- Scope: the tasks it performs and the ones it never touches.
- Limits: which systems it can reach and which operations it may run without a person.
- Log: a record of every step, so anyone can check where an answer came from.
- Human in the loop: the moment it stops and hands the case to a person.
Who is accountable
An agent is accountable for nothing. The person who deployed it and the person who approves its work are. In our projects the agent prepares, and an engineer or the client’s employee signs the result.
If you already run an assistant that works “most of the time”, start by collecting the cases where it was wrong. That is the shortest way to find which of the four guardrails is missing.