AI Agents & Automation

AI agents represent a paradigm shift from simple chatbots to autonomous systems that can perceive their environment, reason about what to do, take actions using tools, and iterate until a task is complete.

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What Is an AI Agent?

The Agent Loop:
===============

                +-------------+
                |   Observe   |
                | Environment |
                +------+------+
                       |
                       v
                +-------------+
          +---->|   Reason    |
          |     |  & Plan     |
          |     +------+------+
          |            |
          |            v
          |     +-------------+
          |     |    Act      |
          |     | (Use Tools) |
          |     +------+------+
          |            |
          |            v
          |     +-------------+
          |     |  Evaluate   |------ Goal met? ---> DONE
          |     |  Result     |
          |     +------+------+
          |            |
          |         No |
          +------------+
             (iterate)

Key insight: An agent takes multiple steps autonomously rather than generating a single response.

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Tool Use and Function Calling

Common Agent Tools