What is an AI Agent?

OVERVIEW: Welcome to The Reasoning Show! We dig into one of the foundational building blocks of modern Generative AI, the AI Agent. So what is an AI Agent, and what do we need to think about for the next couple years? 

SHOW: 1007

SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Reasoning Show #1007 Transcript

SHOW VIDEO: https://www.youtube.com/@TheReasoningShow/

SHOW NOTES:

Topic 1 - We’re 3+ years into the Generative AI era. Why do you think AI Agents, or Agentic AI, is now getting so much attention? 

Topic 2 - If someone asked you to explain what an AI Agent is, how would you do that? 

Topic 3 - What are some of the core elements of AI Agents that you’re seeing impact how people think about and use agents?

• How to define tasks
• Languages and frameworks
• Ability to orchestrate multiple agents
• Human-in-the-Loop vs. Autonomous
• Other?

Topic 4 - AI Agents are going to spark the great “how much should I pay for this?” discussion. Have you given this any thought yet?  

Topic 5 - How do you expect to use AI agents in your day-to-day work, and how do you expect this to impact Enterprise businesses?

ESSENTIAL READING

• Building Effective Agents" by Anthropic: designing agents with tools, memory, reasoning loops
• A Comprehensive Review of AI Agents: how agents perceive, reason, decide, act
• Top 20 AI Agent Concepts You Should Know: covering ReAct, Chain of Thought, memory types
• AI Agents in Action: Foundations for Evaluation and Governance: structured foundation for safety aspects of agent deployment

Essential Viewing

• AI Agentic Design Patterns w/ AutoGen: build autonomous agents that use tools
• AI Agent Systems w/ crewAI: orchestrating teams of agents
• LangGraph Course: how to build stateful, reliable agents

Frameworks & Tools 

• LangGraph: standard for complex, stateful agents (nodes, edges, loops)
• CrewAI: Best for structured task delegation and multi-agent collaboration
• AutoGen: Microsoft's framework for multi-agent conversational systems
• Model Context Protocol (MCP): standard for connecting agents, tools, data
• n8n: no-code/low-code visual agent building

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