When AI can independently book your travel, analyze your emails and make pricing decisions, compliance concerns multiply. Many in the tech industry view AI agents as the next frontier in the development and commercialization of AI technology.
This nascent technology is likely to raise many important questions for the sector, including novel legal questions involving antitrust and data privacy law that expand ongoing AI debates and concerns. In fact, agentic AI is so new that currently there is no consensus in the technology industry on the precise definition of an AI agent, but the basic concept is that an AI agent is a software application that can take in information and then act on it by using a wider variety of tools to achieve a goal with a much higher degree of autonomy than current technologies.
Think of a software application that could independently use other software tools like a web browser, spreadsheets or a word processor to accomplish goals defined for it by a user providing instructions in natural language β in much the same way you might instruct another person to help with a task. In contrast, the generative AI tools that many people have become familiar with over the past couple of years typically rely on detailed prompts β specific and well-defined instructions β to guide the generation of new text, images or other media.
AI agents are expected to operate in a somewhat similar way but with much more autonomy, vaster capabilities and more broadly defined goals. To illustrate, an AI agent might be given a task like scheduling a trip for you to visit another city, including by connecting autonomously with various travel websites and booking appropriate hotels and transportation on its own.
Another example might be asking an AI agent to handle a task in which the agent will analyze a set of spreadsheets for certain data, process the data as needed, go to a particular website and send the results of the data analysis into an online form.
