Agents

Gold definitionUpdated Apr 2, 2026

Definition

Agents, particularly Large Language Model (LLM) agents, are autonomous systems designed to perform complex tasks by interacting with their environment. They leverage advanced reasoning to adapt to diverse domains, addressing the challenge of labor-intensive human-designed solutions.

At a glance

Executive summary

AI agents are autonomous systems, often powered by large language models, that can perceive, reason, and act to achieve goals in complex environments. The current challenge is moving from labor-intensive human-designed agents to automatically created and adaptive ones that learn from their experiences to improve performance.

TL;DR

AI agents are smart programs that act autonomously to complete tasks, and researchers are trying to make them automatically learn and adapt instead of being manually built for every job.

Key points

Autonomous systems that perceive, reason, and act to achieve goals, often leveraging LLMs.
Solves the problem of labor-intensive, human-designed agents by enabling automatic creation and adaptation.
Used by researchers and ML engineers to automate complex tasks across various industrial sectors.
Differs from traditional black-box agent generation by learning from interaction histories rather than just final performance.
Research trend focuses on experience-driven learning and 'agent-as-optimizer' paradigms for robust, adaptive agents.

Use cases

Automated customer service bots that handle complex queries and resolve issues without human intervention.
Autonomous research agents that explore scientific literature, formulate hypotheses, and design experiments.
Personalized digital assistants that manage schedules, respond to emails, and execute tasks across multiple applications.
Robotic control systems that learn and adapt to new environments and tasks in manufacturing or logistics.
Financial trading agents that analyze market data, predict trends, and execute trades autonomously.

Also known as

LLM Agents, AI Agents, Intelligent Agents, Autonomous Agents, Software Agents