Unit 01 · 4 minITHR Academy
What is an AI Agent?
The one-line definition
An AI agent is software that perceives its environment, reasons about it, takes actions using tools, and reflects on the outcome to improve.
The core loop
Every agent, from a customer-support assistant to an autonomous supply-chain planner, runs a variant of the same loop: perceive → reason → act → reflect. The action step is what separates agents from chatbots — an agent writes to a database, triggers a workflow, or calls an API.
A concrete example
Imagine an AIOps agent watching your production logs. When it sees a spike in 500 errors, it perceives the anomaly, reasons about likely causes using history + docs, acts by rolling back the last deployment, then reflects by writing a post-mortem draft for the on-call engineer.
