Autonomous Agent

An autonomous agent is an AI system that pursues a goal end-to-end without human approval at each step, using tools to act on the world and adapting its plan as it receives feedback. Autonomous agents contrast with supervised agents, where a human reviews each action before it executes.

The boundary between supervised and autonomous is a governance decision, not a technical one. Most enterprise deployments start supervised and extend autonomy incrementally as the agent's error rate and behavior become well-characterized.