'Flashes of brilliance and frustration': I let an AI agent run my day

Stone, who is the founder and director of the Learning Agents Research Group at his university, has spent decades thinking about the possibility of AI agents. They are, he says, systems that "sense the environment, decide what to do and take an action". Put in those terms, it may feel as if AI agents have been with us for years. For instance, IBM's Deep Blue computer appeared to have reacted to events on a real-world chessboard to beat former World Chess Champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. But Deep Blue wasn't an agentic AI, says Stone. "It was decision-making, but it wasn't sensing or acting," he says.