AI agents are systems that can activate on their own based on any event such as the time of day or specific data that it sees. Agents can keep track of myriad events and deal with anything connected to the Internet. For example, they can look for products, book a flight or hotel reservation and compare information from various sources.
Agents are given instructions that may execute tasks in the future, whereas chatbots answer the user's question within a few seconds from a prompt. Because chatbots increasingly access external sources and can hand off work to an agent, the difference between agents and chatbots is blurring. See
RAG,
AI agent and
chatbot.