In the field of Artificial Intelligence (AI), agents are autonomous entities that perceive their environment through sensors and act upon that environment with actuators to achieve specific goals. These agents can range from simple, rule-based mechanisms to complex, learning, and adapting entities capable of making decisions in dynamic and unpredictable environments.

• Personal Assistants: Virtual assistants like Siri and Alexa interpret voice commands and perform actions for users.
• Robotics: Autonomous robots, from vacuum cleaners to Mars rovers, navigate and manipulate their environment using AI agent principles.
• Games: AI agents control non-player characters (NPCs) in video games, providing challenges and interactions for players.
• Business Automation: Automate decision-making processes in various industries, optimizing operations, and providing predictive analytics.
• Healthcare: Assist in monitoring patient health, supporting diagnostic systems, and personalizing patient care plans.

Types of Agents

• Simple Reflex Agents: Operate on direct condition-action rules, responding to the current percept without considering past percepts.
• Model-Based Reflex Agents: Maintain an internal state to track non-immediately perceptible aspects of the world, using a model to make decisions.
• Goal-Based Agents: Act to achieve specific goals, considering future actions and their outcomes.
• Utility-Based Agents: Evaluate options based on a utility function, choosing actions that maximize overall utility.
• Learning Agents: Improve performance and adapt to changing environments over time, learning from past experiences.

Characteristics

• Autonomy: Operate without human intervention, making decisions based on programming and learning.
• Proactivity: Take initiative beyond merely reacting to the environment, driven by goals and objectives.
• Social Ability: Interact with other agents or humans to achieve goals, often using communication.

• Agent architecture
• Intelligent agent – Wikipedia