AI agents vs. AI assistants: What’s the difference?
The AI evolution has seen basic bots following a limited list of rules turn into smarter AI chatbots that learnt to recognise human language through natural language processing (NLP). More recent use of API integration, large language models (LLMs), and retrieval augmented generation (RAG) has enabled those AI chatbots to morph into complex AI assistants that can now take actions on our behalf.
Today, those smart AI assistants are learning to make decisions so they can operate autonomously, and the result of that is the formation of separate AI agents that break away from more general duties to perform isolated tasks.
While the AI agents we’re building today perform specific tasks, the AI assistants we’ve been creating for 10 years on AI Studio oversee the AI environment.
Example: AI-managed expenses
1. An employee speaks to the AI assistant to submit their expenses claim
The AI assistant’s been trained by the company to recognise requests from their employees and be able to speak with them in natural language, like a human would. It’s a true assistant, learning over time what people need to do and checking everything’s in place for them to do it, ready for an AI agent to complete the tasks needed for the employee to submit the expenses claim.
2. The AI assistant calls the appropriate AI agent to handle the expenses claim
As soon as the AI assistant knows what work needs to be done, it passes the task over to an AI agent that’s specifically trained to handle expense claims (there may be other AI agents employed to handle smaller, specific tasks within this too). The AI agents can pull information from other systems, or add to them, and make decisions on how best to process the claim.
It’s expert in its one task only, able to:
- Read a scanned receipt to check the expenses claim is legitimate
- Verify the employee’s identity
- Confirm the expense is for business purposes
- Check the date for the claim is within the acceptable timeframe
- Identify any errors in calculations for the claim
- Pass the claim back to the employee, if needed, or process it through integration with any system a business might use to log and approve expenses
3. Once the AI agent’s completed its role the AI assistant takes over again
The AI assistant lets the employee know if the claim is approved or rejected, based on the actions and decisions the AI agent has taken.
Rather than the employee having to make a phone call, send an email, log into a computer system or chase a colleague, they simply chat with the AI assistant on any channel it appears ― using text or voice. The conversation is instant, can happen at any time of the night or day at the employee’s convenience, and in any language from any part of the world.
