What a vendor means when they say “agent”
The word is about to be everywhere. It currently describes four quite different things, and only one of them needs your careful attention.
« Agent » has become the word of the year in this industry, and it is used for at least four different things. Before the autumn wave of announcements, it is worth being able to tell them apart in a sales conversation.
One: a chatbot with a job title
The weakest use. A normal assistant with instructions telling it to behave like a support agent or a research agent. Nothing new is happening; it is a prompt with a name.
Harmless, occasionally useful, and not worth a premium.
Two: a model that can look things up
It can search, read a document, query a system, and use what it finds. This is genuinely useful and is what most business « agents » actually are.
The question to ask is simply what can it see? — because everything it can read, it can quote into an answer, including to somebody who should not have that answer.
Three: a model that can act
It sends the email, books the appointment, creates the invoice, updates the record. This is the category that needs your attention, and the rule from 21 July has not changed: anything that sends, pays, books or deletes needs a human confirmation step.
Four: several of the above, running unsupervised for a long time
A system that pursues a goal over hours, deciding its own steps. Impressive in demonstrations, and the place where mistakes compound rather than appear.
For a Swiss SME in 2025 this is not a sensible thing to buy. Not because it cannot work, but because when it goes wrong it will have done eleven things before anyone notices, and you will be reconstructing which.
The single question
When a supplier says agent, ask: what can it do without asking me?
The answer places it in one of the four categories immediately, and it is a question no brochure answers by accident.