The Anatomy of an Autonomous Agent | by Eric Broda | Dec, 2024
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 purpose(s), has social interplay capabilities, and may repeatedly be taught and enhance”. Wikipedia affords the same definition: “autonomous brokers are computational programs that inhabit some advanced dynamic atmosphere, sense and act autonomously on this atmosphere, and by doing so notice a set of objectives or duties for which they’re designed.” And in a earlier article, I provided the next definition which I believe captures each: autonomous brokers use agentic AI (subtle 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 must be in place to create a “good” agent that may plan and execute duties? And since no agent stands alone however reasonably works in an ecosystem of…