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Agent

What is an Agent​

What is an Intelligent Agent?​

An intelligent agent refers to a smart program or system capable of autonomous perception, understanding, reasoning, and execution. It can independently formulate plans, invoke tools, perform tasks based on user-provided goals, and even dynamically adjust its behavior according to feedback during the task process, ultimately achieving the goals efficiently.
Unlike traditional software programs that rely on manual step-by-step operations, an intelligent agent can "think and act" on behalf of the user, thus realizing a complete task loop of "instruction-driven → autonomous decision-making → automatic execution."

Core Characteristics of Intelligent Agents​

  • Goal-oriented: Clearly defines task objectives and formulates strategies based on user instructions or context.
  • Autonomous behavior: Possesses a certain degree of initiative and autonomy, capable of independently executing complex tasks without step-by-step guidance.
  • Environmental perception and feedback: Able to obtain information from external systems, data sources, or user inputs, and dynamically adjust execution paths accordingly.
  • Tool invocation capability: Can flexibly call external resources such as search engines, databases, APIs, automation tools, etc., to complete necessary operations for the task.
  • Continuous learning and optimization: Some advanced intelligent agents have the ability to continuously learn and optimize, improving performance over long-term use.

Illustrative Analogy​

  • You can think of traditional software as a "toolbox," where each function requires you to manually click and operate;
  • Whereas an intelligent agent is more like a "skilled assistant," you only need to tell it "what I need to accomplish," and it can decide which tools to use, in what order, and how to handle unexpected situations to ultimately achieve the goal.

Application Scenarios​

Intelligent assistants are widely applied across multiple business domains. Typical scenarios include:

  1. Enterprise Automation Office

    • Automatically drafting daily reports, weekly reports, meeting minutes, emails, etc.
    • Automatic schedule management and meeting coordination
    • Automatic data analysis and generation of charts and conclusion reports

  2. Financial Services and Risk Management

    • Automatically generating compliance or audit reports
    • Risk public opinion monitoring and anomaly event identification
    • Automated customer risk assessment and credit scoring