Glossary
What is AI agent?
Software that takes a goal, decides the steps on its own and uses your tools to finish the job, instead of only answering a question.
Also written as agentic AI.
A chatbot answers. An AI agent acts. You give it a goal, such as “book a call with every lead who asked for a quote this week”, and it works out the steps, opens the tools it has been given access to, and does them one by one until the job is done or it needs a person.
What makes it an agent is that loop: look at the situation, choose the next step, use a tool, check the result, repeat. The thinking comes from an LLM; the hands come from the connections you give it, usually through an API or an MCP server.
What a small business uses one for
- Answering new leads on the website, by text or by phone, and booking them straight into the calendar.
- Reading incoming documents, sorting them and filing them in the right folder.
- Preparing a daily summary of what came in, what was handled and what needs you.
What to watch
An agent can only do what it is allowed to do, so the permissions are the whole safety story. Start it with read access, add write access one tool at a time, and keep a person in the loop for anything that spends money or talks to a client in a new way.
