AI Glossarytechniques

AI Agent

An AI system that can autonomously plan, reason, use tools, and take actions to accomplish goals with minimal human intervention.

How It Works

AI agents go beyond simple chatbots by maintaining state, using tools, and making multi-step plans. An agent might: (1) Receive a goal ("book me the cheapest flight to Paris next month"), (2) Search flights using an API, (3) Compare options, (4) Ask clarifying questions, (5) Book the selected flight. Frameworks like LangChain, CrewAI, and OpenAI's Agents SDK help build agents. The key challenge is reliability: agents must handle errors, ambiguity, and unexpected states gracefully.

Common Use Cases

  • 1Customer service automation
  • 2Data analysis pipelines
  • 3Code generation assistants
  • 4Research automation

Related Terms

RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)

A technique that enhances AI responses by retrieving relevant information from a knowledge base before generating an answer.

Prompt Engineering

The practice of crafting effective instructions for AI models to produce desired outputs consistently.

Function Calling (Tool Use)

An AI capability where the model can decide to invoke external functions or APIs based on the conversation context.

MCP (Model Context Protocol)

An open standard by Anthropic that provides a universal way for AI models to connect to external data sources and tools.

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