The longer story
An AI agent is a system that can autonomously plan and carry out multi-step tasks to achieve a goal. Unlike a chatbot that responds to one prompt at a time, an agent can break a task into sub-tasks, use external tools (search engines, APIs, databases, code interpreters), evaluate its own progress, and adjust its approach. Agents are an emerging capability in AI and are increasingly used for research, coding, data analysis, and workflow automation.