Gartner went looking for AI agents in 2025 and found something worth remembering. Of the thousands of vendors claiming agentic capability, roughly 130 were building anything that deserved the word. Not 130 good ones out of a field of 200. One hundred and thirty out of thousands.
That ratio is the reason this question is hard to answer by reading marketing pages. The term is applied to chatbots, to scheduled scripts, to autocomplete, and occasionally to something that genuinely is an agent. So it is worth starting from the technical definition rather than the sales one, because the technical definition is short and it draws a line you can actually check.
One Sentence, and Then the Consequences
An AI agent is a system in which the model decides what happens next, rather than the code.
That is the whole distinction. Anthropic, whose engineering team wrote the reference description of this, splits the field into two: workflows are "systems where LLMs and tools are orchestrated through predefined code paths", while agents are "systems where LLMs dynamically direct their own processes and tool usage".
