Move over chatbots, AI agents are the next big thing. What are they?

A future where everyone has an artificial intelligence-powered assistant might not be too far off.

While tech giants and AI startups have been racing to launch the smartest AI-powered chatbots, recent AI product rollouts point to a shift toward developing the most helpful AI-powered assistants — or as some in the tech industry are calling them, AI agents.

While addressing concerns over the impact AI will have on jobs, Nvidia (NVDA-1.44%) chief executive Jensen Huang said that it’s likely every job, including his, will be transformed by the technology, because everyone will eventually have an AI assistant. Even Nvidia’s chip designers are using AI assistants, Huang said during an interview at the industry conference SIGGRAPH 2024. Without AI assistants, the company’s highly sought-after Hopper chips, which power some of the world’s leading AI models, wouldn’t have been possible, he said. The same apparently goes for the chipmaker’s new AI platform, Blackwell.

“I think the main reason is that the value that they capture and generate is just a magnitude different from what we’ve had so far,” Daniel Vassilev, co-founder and chief executive of Relevance AI, told Quartz. “What agents are kind of promising us is this future where they can complete work that was previously impossible to be done with automation.”

Companies are starting to focus on AI agents because “everyone realizes now that we’re in a place where the future is going to look very different — we’re going to have the capacity to do a whole lot more,” Vassilev said. “I think a lot of people are realizing that the old way of doing things is probably also going to change.”

What is an AI agent?

Simply put, an AI agent is software that can complete complex tasks autonomously.

So far, most AI-powered tools have been co-pilots that can help users work more efficiently, Vassilev said.

OpenAI’s ChatGPT, for example, is a co-pilot. Users can interact with and work alongside ChatGPT, “but it’s still ultimately an assistant” that has to be prompted over and over, Vassilev said.

With AI agents, users can delegate work to the tool, then check to see if it needs assistance or if it has finished. Vassilev’s company, Relevance, develops virtual workforces of AI agents that are used by major companies including Activision (MSFT-1.18%) and Roku (ROKU-6.87%).

Rebecca Greene, co-founder and chief technology officer of Regal, said AI agents are “like humans” that can be given personas and jobs to do. But, Greene said, AI agents are not meant to trick customers into thinking they’re speaking to a real human.

“When you’re calling them or when they’re calling you, they know exactly what they’re trying to accomplish, what their goals are, what their personality is,” Greene said.

Regal, which develops purpose-built AI agents for call centers, believes 90% of interactions in contact centers are going to be AI-led over the next ten years, Greene said.

For now, most AI agents are simple, Greene said, such as those used for setting up doctor’s appointments.

“An AI agent can place a phone call, not take the doctor’s time, speak to the customer on the other side, find a mutually agreeable time to schedule something, book that appointment in the doctor’s calendar, and the customer confirms it,” she said.

So far, Greene said Regal’s clients see acceptance from customers for AI agents, which can perform better than some humans in areas such as speaking in several languages, being available at all hours of the day, and keeping composure in difficult situations.

Who is building AI agents?

Microsoft launched its new, purpose-built AI agents in Microsoft 365 Copilot at Ignite 2024, its annual conference for developers. The AI agents can work on simple or complex, multi-step tasks with or on behalf of a team or organization, Microsoft said.

The new AI agents include the Interpreter agent that allows for real-time interpretation in up to nine languages in Microsoft Teams meetings. The Interpreter agent, which will be in preview early next year, gives meeting participants the ability to speak and listen to meetings in the language of their choice. The agent can also simulate a participant’s voice.

The Project Manager agent, which is in preview now, can automate project management tasks in Microsoft Planner. The agent can automatically create new plans from scratch or from a template, assign tasks, track project progress, and send status updates to participants, Microsoft said.

In Copilot Studio, Microsoft announced that customers can build their own autonomous agents that can take action without prompting. In the agent library, users can build off of templates of common-use AI agents.

In October, Microsoft announced that it would be rolling out the AI agents which, “offer more precise predictions, enhanced natural language processing, and improved decision-making support.”

At SIGGRAPH 2024 in July, Meta (META-0.62%) chief executive Mark Zuckerberg announced the wider rollout of Meta’s platform, AI Studio, which allows users and creators to generate AI characters of themselves that can act as an assistant for different tasks, including interacting with their community. Meta’s vision, Zuckerberg said, is to empower users, from creators to small businesses, to create agents for themselves.

Meanwhile AI startup OpenAI is reportedly preparing to launch an AI agent, codenamed “Operator,” that can do tasks on behalf of a person, including coding and booking travel, Bloomberg reported. The startup is also reportedly close to completing another AI agent project that can perform tasks in a web browser.

What does the future look like?

As companies begin adopting AI agents, they will likely invest in building their own, Greene said, that align with their industry-use cases and that are trained on their data.

Vassilev said the focus will be on less-risky parts of a business, such as highly-repetitive and monotonous tasks that workers don’t want to do.

Now that companies realize that “2025 is going to be the year of AI agents,” Vassilev said he expects an uptick in AI agent products.

Alongside that, people will have to build trust with AI agents the way they would with a human co-worker.

“When you’re hiring someone, you want to trust them, you want to know they’re doing a good job,” Vassilev said. “I think in a similar way, when you’re adopting an agent that’s going to be autonomous, you also need to build that trust.”