What is an AI agent, and how is it different from a reg...

A chatbot’s job ends at the response — you send a message, it returns text, and whatever happens next is entirely on you. Ask a chatbot to book a flight and the honest answer is “I can’t do that”; it has no way to act on the world beyond generating words.

An agent is built to close that gap. Given the same request, it checks your calendar for available dates, searches flights, compares prices, picks a reasonable option, and books it — several steps, several tools, with the system itself deciding what to do at each point rather than waiting for you to spell out each action.

The distinction really comes down to three things a chatbot doesn’t have: it perceives more than the current message (state, tool results, prior context), it reasons across multiple steps toward a goal rather than producing one response, and it acts on external systems rather than only producing text. Take away any one of those and you’re back to a chatbot with extra formatting.