Answers
What is an AI agent?
The answer
An AI agent is software that pursues a goal rather than executing a script: it reads context, plans a sequence of actions, uses tools — searching, writing, calling systems, transacting — and adjusts from results, with or without a human approving each step. The practical difference from a chatbot is agency: it does the work, not just describes it.
The anatomy is consistent across vendors: a model for reasoning, tools for acting, memory for context, and a governance layer deciding what the agent may do alone and what escalates to a person. Autonomy is a dial, not a switch — the same architecture runs as a copilot beside an employee or as a fleet working a queue overnight, and serious deployments run under orchestration so every action is assigned, logged, and auditable.
For capital markets the significance is categorical: agents are priced against labor, not against software, which resets the addressable market of every workflow they touch. The investable layer is the stack around them — orchestration such as FlashyOS, persistent memory such as Flashy Mind, agent-to-agent protocols, and networks of autonomous economic agents like portfolio company Fetch.ai.