Will the real AI agent please stand up?
These days, everything’s an “AI agent.”
Your chatbot? Agent. That email tool? Agent. That meeting scheduler that double-booked you? Clearly a double agent. The thing that just copied text from one place to another? Super advanced agent, obviously.
With “agent” slapped onto every AI tool, the term has become so watered down that it’s losing meaning.
But who am I to decide what counts as a real AI agent? I’ll leave that to those with a higher pay grade.
That said, I still need a way to make sense of it all.
One framework that stuck with me comes from Paul Roetzer (CEO of the Marketing AI Institute). He suggests that a true AI agent works independently, on our behalf, across five key functions:
Set goals
Make plans
Execute tasks
Learn from results
Analyze outcomes
But most so-called “agents” today only handle execution on their own. A few can do planning or analysis. But I’ve yet to see one that does all five, particularly setting its own goals.
While research projects like AI agents forming societies in Minecraft (as discussed by Eric Vyacheslav here) hint at where we’re headed, they’re still experimental, not commercial AI solutions.
So now, when someone tells me they have an “agent,” I just ask: Which of these five capabilities does it actually have?
That simple question cuts through the hype without needing a PhD in AI.
Hope it helps you too!
What’s the most interesting “AI agent” capability you’ve seen recently?
#AIAgents #AITechStack #AITools #Autonomous #AIAssistants
