AI agent
An AI agent is a software system that pursues a stated goal by choosing its own sequence of actions — deciding which tools to call and in what order — rather than following a path fixed by its builder.
What separates an agent from a chatbot
A chat interface produces text. An agent takes actions: it can look something up, write to a record, send a message, or hand a task to a person, and it selects those actions itself based on the goal it was given. A system can have a chat interface without being an agent, and it can be an agent without any chat interface at all.
What separates an agent from a workflow
A workflow is a route drawn in advance. An agent is given a destination and works out a route. That flexibility is useful where the possible paths are too numerous to enumerate, and a liability where the correct path is already known and must be followed exactly.
What this means for a business decision
Agency is a design choice with an operational cost. An agent needs defined tool access, defined boundaries, logging of what it did, and a human review point wherever an action is expensive to reverse. Where those controls are absent, narrower automation is usually the better engineering decision — not the more cautious one.