What is an AI agent?

When you think of AI agents, do you imagine a personal AI assistant like Tony Stark’s Jarvis? Perhaps a calm-under-pressure TARS from Interstellar? Or, more on the scary spectrum, an amoral HAL 9000 straight out of 2001: A Space Odyssey? Current technology doesn’t come close to that kind of science fiction (yet). But the field is evolving fast. What AI agents are capable of today looks nothing like it did even just a few months ago.  Here’s how AI agents actually work, what they can do right now