What are AI agents and how do they differ from traditional chatbots?
AI agents are autonomous software systems that can perceive their environment, make decisions, and take actions to achieve specific goals. Unlike traditional rule-based chatbots that follow predefined scripts and decision trees, AI agents use large language models for reasoning, can use tools and APIs to interact with external systems, maintain conversation context across interactions, and dynamically adapt their behavior based on the situation. Traditional chatbots handle predictable queries with scripted responses. AI agents handle open-ended conversations, execute multi-step tasks, access databases and APIs, and make decisions in ambiguous situations. The key capabilities that distinguish agents are reasoning about complex problems, tool use for interacting with external systems, memory for maintaining context, and planning for breaking complex goals into actionable steps.