Agents
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.
Related terms
- AI Agent — An AI agent is a software system that takes a goal, plans a sequence of steps to reach it, executes those steps using tools (APIs, databases, browsers, code), and adapts when steps fail.
- Agentic AI — Agentic AI describes systems that pursue goals autonomously over multiple steps without per-step human approval.
- Agent Orchestration — Agent orchestration is the coordination of multiple AI agents — assigning tasks, managing information flow between them, handling failures, and aggregating results into a final output.