A chatbot hands you a draft. An agent does the job.
Give it the goal and the tools it is allowed to touch. It picks the route, uses what it needs, and comes back with work for you to review.
AI Impact HubAI Impact HubFor anyone whose feed keeps shouting about agents without ever saying what one is.
Try it right here ↓Free to read. The try-it part runs on a free account.
People search for agents expecting magic or menace. The working definition is calmer and more useful: you give an agent a goal, some background and the tools it needs, then you review its work. That is exactly what you would give a new staff member, which means you already know how to work with one: like a manager.
You give an agent the goal, not the steps. Ask for every PDF on a website and it will try one technique, fail, try another, and keep going until the job is done. You set the outcome and the boundaries; it works out the route.
Which makes the shift managerial rather than technical. You move from making the work to editing it, so the skills that matter are the ones a good manager already has: knowing what good looks like, spotting what is wrong, and asking for the change in a way that lands.
Start smaller than the hype suggests. Take one task you would otherwise hand to a person, work out what the best person for that job would need to know, and configure exactly that. One agent, one job.
Give it the goal and the tools it is allowed to touch. It picks the route, uses what it needs, and comes back with work for you to review.
One check at the end meets everything at once, after it has all compounded. Two check-ins along the way cost minutes and save the rebuild.
The five-part anatomy of an agent. Step through the parts, then take the design prompt at the end.
The model underneath: the brain. It already went to every university and read the whole internet. That part is solved, and it is the part you rent.
The intelligence is the least interesting part. Everyone has the same brains available.
The guide is free to read. This part is a working exercise, and a free account opens it and keeps your progress across the Hub.
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