What is AI Agents?
AI Agents are autonomous systems that use language models to plan steps, execute actions in external tools and pursue goals with little or no intermediate human supervision. Instead of answering one question at a time, an agent decomposes the problem, decides what to do, acts (sends emails, calls APIs, writes code, updates spreadsheets) and adjusts course as it learns.
In practice
Product teams use agents to automate repetitive flows: ticket triage, lead qualification, weekly report generation, feedback analysis at scale, and even executing tasks inside the product itself. Building a good agent requires clarity on the goal, the available tools and the limits of what it can do without human approval. K21's Product AI courses show how to combine agents and vibe coding to build solutions that take action in the real world — not just generate text.
What happens when it is missing
Without agents, organizations keep spending human hours on repetitive work that machines can already do better. Qualified people become spreadsheet operators and information-copyists between systems. The opportunity cost is enormous: time that could be spent on strategy, discovery and customer relationships is consumed by tasks a well-designed agent would handle in seconds.
Related terms
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