The word "agent" marks the difference between AI that responds and AI that acts. A chatbot answers your question about an invoice; an agent finds the invoice, notices it is overdue, drafts the reminder, and, depending on its permissions, sends it. The defining ingredients are a goal, access to tools (email, databases, APIs), and the ability to chain steps without a human scripting each one.
For a small business, agents are simultaneously the opportunity and the risk. The opportunity: admin work is exactly the multi-step, tool-hopping toil agents are good at. The risk: an agent with send permissions is only as safe as its judgment on its worst day, and the documented failures, invented policies, wrong amounts, deleted data, are all cases of agents acting where nobody was positioned to check.
The practical question when evaluating any agent product is therefore not "how smart is it" but "what can it do without a person, and is that list right for my stakes?" Some products answer with autonomy plus monitoring; approval-first products answer by requiring a human sign-off on every outbound action. Both are agents; the permission architecture is the real product decision.
See the term in practice
Connect your tools read only and watch the approval queue prepare real actions from your own context. Nothing sends until you approve it.