What Are AI Agents? A Simple Guide Anyone Can Understand

If you're hearing words like "agentic AI" or "AI agents" and feeling confused don't worry. You're not alone. Most explanations are either way too technical or too basic to be helpful.

This blog is made for people who use AI tools like ChatGPT, aren’t tech experts, and just want to understand enough to know what’s going on and how it affects them.

We’ll walk through it step by step:

Level 1: What’s a Language Model? (Like ChatGPT)

Let’s start with something you already know.

When you type something into ChatGPT (or other tools like Claude or Gemini), it reads your message and writes a reply. These tools are built using LLMs large language models. Basically, these are smart computer programs trained to understand and write human-like text.

• You ask a question or give a command → That’s the input

• The AI writes something back → That’s the output
  

Example:
You ask: “Write me an email to schedule a coffee chat.”
ChatGPT writes a nice email back. That’s it.

But here’s a catch:
Ask it “When is my next coffee chat?”, and it won’t know because it doesn’t have access to your calendar.

Two key things about LLMs:

1. They don’t know private stuff like your schedule or company files.

2. They don’t take action they wait for you to ask something first.

Level 2: What’s an AI Workflow?

Now, let’s make things smarter.

What if you could tell the AI:

“Every time I ask about my meetings, first check my Google Calendar.”

Now, when you ask “When’s my chat with Elon Husky?”, it goes to your calendar, finds the answer, and gives it to you. Pretty cool, right?

This is an AI Workflow.

It's like a step-by-step plan that tells the AI what to do.

But there’s a limit.
Let’s say your next question is:

“What will the weather be like on that day?”

Now the AI fails again because we didn’t tell it to check the weather. So it only follows the exact steps you give it.

AI Workflows are smart, but limited:

• You (the human) make all the decisions.

• The AI just follows the instructions you gave it.

By the way, if you hear the word “RAG” (short for Retrieval-Augmented Generation), that just means the AI looks things up (like your calendar or the weather) before answering. It's still just a fancy kind of workflow.

Level 3: What’s an AI Agent?

Now, here’s where it gets exciting.

Let’s say your goal is to write a daily LinkedIn post based on news articles.

Here’s how you’d normally do it:

1. Collect news links.

2. Summarize them using a tool like Perplexity.

3. Write a post using Claude.

4. Schedule it to post at 8am every day.
   
   

That’s still a workflow because you’re the boss, telling the tools what to do.

But now, imagine this:

What if the AI was the boss instead of you?

That’s an AI Agent.

What Can an AI Agent Do Differently?

An AI Agent can:

• Think for itself (“Should I collect full articles or just the links?”)

• Choose the best tools to get the job done (“Google Sheets or Microsoft Word?”)

• Try different options, check if they worked, and improve the results
  
  

In other words, it:

• Thinks (like a human)

• Takes action (like clicking buttons, using tools)

• Improves itself (without you having to step in)

Example:
If the first LinkedIn post wasn’t funny enough, the AI agent could ask another AI to review it and give feedback, then try again all on its own.

That’s something regular workflows can’t do.