#Autonomy

Agent has become one of the most overloaded terms in AI. Product teams use it to describe everything from a chat interface with retrieval to a long-running process that can plan, call tools, and take actions on its own. That vocabulary drift creates a practical problem: teams start arguing about ...

Customer support is a useful capstone example because one message can require retrieval, tool use, memory, routing, and approval boundaries at the same time.

A useful AI system is defined less by whether it is called an assistant or an agent than by how much control it has over the next step.