What Is an AI Agent?

An AI agent is a model-driven application that can follow instructions, use tools, keep task context, and move through more than one step before producing a final result.

The core pieces are instructions, a model, tools, state, and orchestration. OpenAI's Agents SDK describes agents as applications that plan, call tools, collaborate across specialists, and keep enough state to complete multi-step work.

An agent is different from a chatbot because it can do work outside the answer box. It might search files, call an API, run code, open a browser, ask for approval, or hand off part of the task to another specialist agent.

Agents are useful when the user goal is bigger than one response: booking, coding, research, data cleanup, customer support, content production, or any workflow that needs tool calls and checkpoints.