What is an AI agent?

AI agents have been the buzz lately in and around the AI space, but few people know what they actually are and are able to do.

An AI agent is basically an AI model that can interact with external tools and environments. So imagine if you told an AI: “Order a pepperoni pizza for me” and it actually went ahead and did the booking. That is the power of AI agents, they are not just chatbots, but are powerful enough to interact with the world around them.

Workflow of an AI agent

AI agents plan tasks to execute, reflect on outcomes, and use tools to accomplish goals end to end, without human intervention. We just describe to an agent our task, the tools to use, and the goal to accomplish. It will then plan which tools to use, and how to use them to accomplish the goal specified by us.

Imagine you need a website for your business. But instead of hiring a web developer, you describe how you want the website to look, and the agent, using the same tools a web developer would use, goes ahead and builds the entire thing in a matter of seconds. It might seem like science fiction, but this is today’s reality, in the world we live in. At bytemates.ai and our sister company coderustlers.com, we have evolved AI agents to not just automate tasks end to end, but to be your first AI employees.

Here is an example in more detail:

Instead of trying to complete a complicated task in one go,

Technology stack of AI agents

a) Vector Database: All AI agents need a knowledge source to connect to to perform retrieval augmented generation or RAG.

b) Planning framework: AI agents need a framework that helps them plan out the tasks, the most popular one being langchain.

c) LLM: The LLM (large language model) is the engine of an AI agent, and is responsible for the workings of the planning framework and tool usage.

d) Tools: The external tools and APIs that an AI agent is connected to, to help it interact with the real world.