Everyone’s talking about AI Agents. Barely anyone knows what they are.

Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. The enterprise software industry gods have spoken and declared “AI agents" to be the next big thing. The only problem: There’s confusion on what they are.

“When I hear some of the conversations around agentic, I sometimes wonder whether it’s like that old elephant thing? Everybody’s touching a different part of the elephant," said Prem Natarajan, chief scientist and head of enterprise AI at Capital One. “Their description of it is different." AI agents are broadly understood to be systems that can take some action on behalf of humans, like buying groceries or making restaurant reservations. But in some cases, the question of what constitutes an “action" is blurry.

(Is querying enterprise data and delivering an answer based on it an “action"? In some cases it might be and in other cases it might not). Further, not all software actions are considered agentic. For example, if AI is simply taking an action based on specific details provided by a human user, it isn’t agentic, said Tom Coshow, senior director analyst with Gartner’s Technical Service Providers division.

Software needs to reason itself and make decisions based on contextual knowledge to be a true agent, he said. Gartner held an AI agents webinar earlier this year to explain the technology and discuss use cases, Coshow said. Afterward, participants were polled on whether they had ever deployed agents.

Only 6% said yes. A lot of what companies are calling AI agents today are really just chatbots and AI assistants, he said. “It’s a conversation that comes up even internally, as you can imagine," said Capital One’s Natarajan.