What Is an AI Agent? ↗

Editorial Notes

McKinsey’s explainer is the clearest non-technical introduction to AI agents available — written for executives, not engineers. The key distinction it draws is between chatbots (which respond to prompts) and agents (which can plan, use tools, and take actions autonomously). For product leaders, this reframes what “adding AI to your product” can mean: it’s not just a smarter search box, it’s potentially an autonomous workflow that handles multi-step tasks end-to-end. The article covers the business impact across industries and the workforce implications, giving you the vocabulary to discuss agents with both your engineering team and your board. Read this before the provider-specific agent documentation (Anthropic, Mistral, CrewAI) to establish the conceptual foundation — the technical details will make much more sense with this business context in place.