What is an AI agent?
An AI system that's given a goal and works toward it on a person's behalf, rather than one that just answers whatever's typed into it, turn by turn.
2 min read
The distinction is "agentic" versus purely responsive. A search box or a basic assistant answers the question in front of it and stops. An AI agent is handed something closer to a job, find a dog-friendly cottage for this weekend, get the best price on this exact jacket, and it plans, checks facts and takes steps toward finishing that job, sometimes asking for confirmation, sometimes acting within limits it's already been given. Not every AI product is one. Whether something counts usually comes down to whether it's pursuing a goal or just replying.
Good for
Telling a goal-pursuing system apart from a basic chat interface.
Not good for
Drawing a precise technical boundary. The edge cases genuinely blur, and not every vendor uses the word the same way.
What is agentic commerce?
Commerce where an AI agent, acting on a real person's goal, does some or all of the finding, deciding and buying that a person used to do by hand.
What does "agent-ready" mean?
A business is agent-ready when an AI agent can find its real facts, trust them, and complete a booking or purchase, without a person having to fill in the gaps by hand.
What is an agent credential?
A short-lived, scoped proof that an AI agent is who it claims to be, checked before a business trusts a request enough to act on it.