AI agents will transform business processes and magnify risks [Video]

Chatbots sit and wait to be asked questions. Agents, however, are proactive, can act autonomously, and adapt to their environments. And when multiple agents develop into agentic frameworks, the potential power increases exponentially. But with strength in numbers and added complexity comes amplified risks, and the need for more fortified checks.

Credit: Roman Samborskyi / Shutterstock

According to Gartner, an agent doesn’t have to be an AI model. It can also be a software program or another computational entity — or a robot. When multiple independent but interactive agents are combined, each capable of perceiving the environment and taking actions, you get a multiagent system.

And, yes, enterprises are already deploying them. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for example, uses multiagent systems to ensure its clean rooms stay clean so nothing contaminates flight hardware bound for other planets.

Starting in 2018, the agency used agents, in the form of Raspberry PI computers running biologically-inspired neural networks …