Post by Patrick Schaber

Every AI demo right now talks about "AI agents.” Spoiler alert: Not everything is an “AI Agent”. It’s important to know the difference. I had a webinar recording playing in the background this week, and every other word out of the panel was “Agent”. But nothing they were talking about was an actual AI agent. I sort of think of this as chatbots wearing a costume. The difference? A chatbot answers, an agent acts. A chatbot is a vending machine. You put in a question, and it gives you an answer. You're still the one who has to go do the thing. An agent is more like an intern. You give it a goal, and it figures out the steps, opens the tools it needs, takes the action, and reports back. "Update the deal stage in HubSpot for everyone who replied to my Q3 email" is an agent task. "What's a good subject line for my Q3 email" is a chatbot task. Why this matters for your stack: pricing is starting to follow capability. Chatbot tools charge per seat. Agent tools charge per task, per run, or per outcome. If a vendor is calling something an agent but it still hands the work back to you to execute, you're paying agent prices for chatbot work. The test I use: at the end of the interaction, did the system change a record in another system without me touching a keyboard? If yes, agent. If no, chatbot. That’s sort of simplistic, and I’m sure could be debated, but that’s really what it is. If you have questions you want answered in this “It’s Okay to Ask” AI series, let me know! Feel free to DM or comment below.