If you tuned in for Google I/O, OpenAI’s Spring Update, or Microsoft Build this month, you probably heard the term AI agents come up quite a lot in the last month. They’re quickly becoming the next big thing in tech, but what exactly are they? And why is everyone talking about them all of a sudden? Google CEO Sundar Pichai described an artificial intelligence system that could return a pair of shoes on your behalf while onstage at Google I/O.
If you can create agents digitally, there’s not much of a barrier to creating agents that work with the physical world as well. You just have to program that task to a robot. Then you really get into the stuff of science fiction, as AI agents offer the potential to assign robots a task like “take that table’s order” or “install all the shingles on this roof.” We’re a long way from there, but the first step is teaching AI agents to do simple digital tasks.