About AI agents
Discover what AI agents are and how they can accelerate productivity and simplify your integration and automation initiatives.
What is an AI agent?
AI agents are autonomous or semi-autonomous software systems that achieve a defined goal by observing environments, following instructions, using reasoning, and taking action.
Since AI agents are non-deterministic, they can:
- Adapt to different contexts and unique or evolving scenarios
- Generate natural, personalized responses
- Learn over time (when there is access to memory and feedback)
Agent components
An AI Agent has several components that guide its behavior and functionality. Refer to AI Agent components for details.
Why does my business need AI agents?
We’ve moved beyond digital transformation into agentic transformation, where software can understand, reason, and take action in dynamic environments. This shift is reshaping how businesses operate, make decisions, and compete.
With AI agents, business can responsibly build custom, intelligent solutions that simplify complex processes and keep organizations connected, efficient, and competitive.
AI agents can:
- Increase productivity and save time by allowing teams to develop and deliver faster
- Streamline data analysis and accelerate decision making
- Improve accuracy and consistency in repetitive processes that involve variation and require judgment
When do I create an AI agent?
Agentic workflows rely on the AI agent’s reasoning capability to take action and solve problems. Create an AI agent to automate a repeatable process involving decision-making or variation, which simple automation cannot streamline. For example, receiving customer support cases, answering questions, and escalating complex cases to humans.
AI agent examples
For AI agent examples:
- Explore Agent examples for step-by-step tutorials to build agents from real-world use cases.
- Refer to Agentic use cases to discover how AI agents can drive business outcomes.
- Find agent templates in the AI agent template gallery on the Agent Garden home page.
Next steps
Explore Getting Started guide to get an overview on Agentstudio features and capabilities.
