Latest huge funding by tech giants virtually assure that an ecosystem of autonomous brokers will quickly be upon us. However what’s an “autonomous agent”?
Sebastian Thielke, Platform Economics Lead at AWS, describes it like this (paraphrasing): “An autonomous agent reacts to environmental stimuli, is proactive in pursuit of a aim(s), has social interplay capabilities, and might constantly study and enhance”. Wikipedia provides an analogous definition: “autonomous brokers are computational programs that inhabit some advanced dynamic setting, sense and act autonomously on this setting, and by doing so notice a set of objectives or duties for which they’re designed.” And in a earlier article, I supplied the next definition which I believe captures each: autonomous brokers use agentic AI (refined reasoning and iterative planning) to independently plan and execute duties.
With that out of the way in which, I need to get to the first focus of this text: What does an autonomous agent (hereinafter known as an “agent”) structure appear to be, and what are its main parts? What capabilities should be in place to create a “sensible” agent that may plan and execute duties? And since no agent stands alone however somewhat works in an ecosystem of…