What are AI agents and how do they differ from AI apps most of us have been using for the past few years?
AI Chatbots like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini are built on large language models. They respond to prompts and provide answers. They give us information, but don’t take any actions.
AI Agents are built on top of chatbots, but they can do more than answer questions. They act on our behalf, use tools, follow multi-step goals, interact with outside systems, and often take actions with limited human intervention.
Agentic AI refers to systems that control multiple agents and use them to accomplish more ambitious goals.
A standard AI chatbot is like sitting next to a student driver—you must constantly guide, alert, and correct them. An AI agent is like a hired driver: you hand over the keys, set the destination, and it manages the route, traffic, and step-by-step decisions. If there is a traffic slowdown ahead, the hired driver may select an alternate route.
Some sample prompts illustrate the distinction. You might prompt an AI chatbot like this:
Summarize how the federal courts of appeals have split on applying the consumer-expectations test versus the risk-utility test in design-defect products liability claims, and note which circuits favor which approach.
The chatbot reads, reasons, and returns a summary. The exchange begins and ends with text. Whatever the answer’s quality, it has taken no action in the world—you remain the only actor, free to verify, discard, or rely on what it produced.
An agent receives something closer to an instruction than a question—a delegation of authority. We give it a goal and authorize it to pursue it across multiple steps, using tools, often without pausing for our approval. The vocabulary shift is not cosmetic. We prompt a chatbot; we task an agent, much as we delegate to an associate and then answer for the result. We might instruct an AI agent like this:
Monitor my client-matter inbox. When a new email arrives, read it, pull the relevant documents from our case files and billing records, draft a substantive reply, and send it automatically so I needn’t review routine correspondence.
AI agents pose significant new security risks, for reasons we’ll explain in a series of articles.









