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What is an AI agent? Definition and business implications
An AI agent is an autonomous system that combines a language model with external tools to execute multi-step tasks: it analyses a request, plans an action sequence, executes, observes, and adapts its strategy. It differs from an assistant that merely responds.
Three characteristics distinguish an agent from a simple assistant. Autonomy: the agent decides itself which tools to use and in what order, without preprogrammed script. Planning: for a complex task, the agent decomposes into sub-tasks that it chains and revises. The observation-action loop: the agent acts, observes the result of its action, and adapts its strategy accordingly (the ReAct cycle, Reasoning + Acting). In 2026, 57% of organisations deploy agents in production on multi-step workflows, and 81% plan to expand use cases (Anthropic State of AI Agents 2026 report). Dominant frameworks: LangGraph, CrewAI, AutoGen, and the Claude Agent SDK. Three major use cases are emerging: software development agents, customer service agents, data analysis agents.
Concrete example
A 600-employee logistics mid-cap deployed in 2025 an agent to handle customer complaints. The agent receives a complaint email, identifies the order number, queries the ERP to retrieve the status, cross-references with the carrier data, proposes a decision (credit, return, commercial gesture), submits it to the manager if it exceeds 200 euros, and sends the response to the customer. Before the agent, this processing took 18 minutes per case on average. With the agent, the time drops to 4 minutes for 92% of cases, the remaining 8% being escalated to a human operator. Over the year, 11 full-time equivalents could be reassigned to higher-value commercial tasks.
See also
Further reading
Sources
- How enterprises are building AI agents in 2026, Anthropic, February 2026. https://claude.com/blog/how-enterprises-are-building-ai-agents-in-2026
- State of Agent Engineering 2026, LangChain survey of 1,300+ professionals. https://www.langchain.com/state-of-agent-engineering