AI Agent
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What an AI agent is
An agent is software that acts on someone’s behalf. In AI, the term usually means a language model that does more than generate text: it can choose to use tools, read the results and decide what to do next until the task is done or it needs more input.
The line between an AI chatbot and an AI agent is blurry. A chatbot that only answers from documents is mainly conversational. Once it can search a live catalog, fetch data from an API or run a function on a web page, most people call it an agent. The word is also used for systems that work through long, multi-step tasks with little supervision. Agents for customer-facing chat are usually far more constrained.
How an AI agent works
Most AI agents run a simple loop:
The mechanism behind the third step is called tool calling or function calling. The developer, not the model, decides which tools exist and what they are allowed to do. That decision is the main safety boundary of any agent.
- Read the user’s message together with instructions that define the agent’s role and limits.
- Decide whether to answer directly or use a tool. Each tool is described to the model with a name, a purpose and the inputs it needs.
- Call the tool with inputs taken from the conversation, for example a product name or a postcode.
- Read the result, then answer, ask a follow-up question or call another tool.
Example
A visitor asks a bike shop’s website agent: “Do you have a gravel bike under 1,500 euros in size M?” The agent calls the shop’s product search with the right filters, reads the results and replies with the matching bikes, their prices and links. When the visitor then asks about the warranty, the agent answers from the shop’s warranty page without calling a tool at all.
Why AI agents matter for business chatbots
Agents can answer questions that depend on live data, such as stock levels or current prices, which a static knowledge base cannot. They can also hand information to other systems, for example by creating a record in a CRM through its API.
They bring new risks too. A tool can return wrong data, a visitor can try to trick the agent into misusing a tool, and an action taken by mistake has real consequences. Sensible setups give the agent only the tools it needs, limit what each tool can change, ask for confirmation before consequential steps and treat tool results as data, not as instructions.
AI agents in intoCHAT
In intoCHAT, every chatbot is an agent. Besides answering from your content, it can call your own HTTP APIs through custom API actions (up to 25 per agent), run JavaScript functions you register on your page, and search a connected Shopify, WooCommerce, Magento, VTEX or WordPress store to show product cards. For API actions you choose which response fields the model sees. intoCHAT has no built-in order tracking, bookings or checkout in the chat; those require your own API connected as an action.