Stop Calling Everything an AI Agent: From Chatbots to Digital Workers
Originally published by Satish Gopinathan in **The Pragmatic Architect* (LinkedIn Newsletter)*
I keep hearing this a lot these days:
“We’re building AI agents.”
Most of the time… honestly, no, you’re not.
You’re probably building a chatbot, a workflow, or a RAG system.
All useful — I’ve built them myself over the years — but none of these actually own the work.
ChatGPT, Claude, etc. answer questions. That’s it.
They don’t decide. They don’t act. They don’t lose sleep over outcomes.
Automations (RPA, Zapier, n8n…) follow rules — if X, then Y.
The moment something unexpected happens, they break.
RAG systems are great at finding information — but still just memory, not intelligence.
What I mean by an AI Agent
To me, an agent is like a digital employee — and a real one has four capabilities:
- Goal — Not a prompt. A real business outcome (e.g., reduce churn, clear support backlog).
- Plan — Figures out what to do first, what data and tools to use next.
- Act — Doesn’t just chat — it calls APIs, updates systems, sends email, invokes workflows.
- Learn — Remembers what worked and what didn’t and improves over time.
That’s the difference between automation and autonomy.
Why This Distinction Matters
Nobody pays for “cool AI demos.” They pay for saving money, making more money, faster delivery, and fewer manual processes.
The real value is when you connect LLMs + tools + memory + planning into actual business impact.
This is the difference between:
“We added some AI”
and
“This saved us $200k a year.”
Where Most Companies Are Today
Most companies right now are still in the “AI UI” phase — better search, better chat, nicer screens.
The next phase is digital workers.
If your “agent” can’t plan, act, learn, and own a goal, it’s not really an agent. It’s just software with a chatbot attached.
💡 What are you actually building right now — tools or workers?
📬 Want more like this?
I write regularly about Enterprise AI, Architecture, Agents, and Decision Intelligence in my LinkedIn newsletter:
👉 The Pragmatic Architect
https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/the-pragmatic-architect-7415500800896274432/
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