AI Agent

An AI agent is a language model connected to tools and given a goal. Where a chatbot answers a single question, an agent works in a loop: it plans, calls tools (search, calendars, your business systems), evaluates the results, and continues until the job is done or it needs a human decision.

Executives should care because agents are the step where AI stops being a clever interface and becomes workforce capacity. A chatbot can draft an email; an agent can run your entire pre-meeting research routine every morning. That shift brings real leverage — and real governance questions, because an agent that acts can also act wrongly, repeatedly, at machine speed.

Concrete example: before each client meeting, an agent pulls the CRM record, scans recent news about the client, reviews past correspondence, and leaves a one-page brief for the account manager to approve over coffee.

The management frame transfers directly: give the agent a mission, explicit tool access, boundaries, and a review point — the same things you would give a new team member on day one.