Half the industry means "chatbot," the other half means something closer to software with judgment. That gap is the whole story.
Ask ten people in tech what an "agent" is and you'll get ten different answers — and the annoying part is, most of them aren't wrong. They're just describing different things and reaching for the same word because nothing better was on offer.
It's not just casual sloppiness, either. TechCrunch caught OpenAI holding two different definitions in the same week — one post called agents "automated systems that can independently accomplish tasks," another called them "LLMs equipped with instructions and tools." That's not a typo. That's two different products wearing the same name tag.
Strip the marketing away and there's a real distinction underneath. Nielsen Norman Group's version is the cleanest I've found: an agent "pursues a goal by iteratively taking actions, evaluating progress, and deciding its own next steps." A chatbot explains how to do something. An agent has a go at doing it. Anthropic draw much the same line in their own engineering notes — "workflows," where an LLM is steered through code someone else wrote, versus "agents," where the model directs its own process and keeps the wheel. Most of what gets called an agent today is a workflow wearing an agent's coat.
That coat is doing real commercial work. Talk to anyone who sits through vendor pitches for a living and you'll hear the same complaint — one analyst told CIO.com he's watched "basic automation" get "rebranded as autonomous agents" dozens of times over. When a word stops meaning something specific, it stops being useful: not for buying decisions, not for governance, not for telling your own stakeholders what the thing will actually do the day nobody's watching it.
So when someone tells you they've built an agent, don't just nod. Ask where it sits on that spectrum — how much it can act, and how much it decides for itself. Ask whether it's a workflow dressed up for the pitch. The word won't tell you. What it does the moment you stop supervising it will.