"AI Agent" has become one of those phrases that means everything and nothing depending on who's using it. It gets attached to basic customer service bots, to tools running overnight making business decisions, and to everything in between. And then there's "agentic AI," which most people use interchangeably with "AI agent" but shouldn't. If you've been nodding along while wondering what actually separates any of these things from a very clever chatbot, this episode is for you.

In this episode, Jess and Kyle revisit the basics of AI agents: what an AI agent actually is, what makes something agentic, why those two things are different, and a much needed update to our Ladder of Autonomy, the framework that helps you figure out which level of AI autonomy actually makes sense for your business right now. Plus, an accidental code leak from Anthropic that revealed a lot more than anyone expected about where this technology is heading.

This is part one of a multi-part series on AI agents and agentic AI.

What You'll Learn

What actually makes something an AI agent
The difference between an AI agent and agentic AI and why the two get confused constantly
How to use the Ladder of Autonomy to assess any AI tool or workflow — and where Cowork, OpenClaw, and Perplexity Computer each sit on it
What the key failure modes are for agents in live business environments, and the questions you should be asking before you deploy anything
The Anthropic Claude Code source code leak and what it revealed about unreleased features and how far ahead the labs are building

Timestamps:

00:00 What We've Been Up To

04:25 Why we're revisiting agents

07:26 What Is an AI agent?

11:11 LLMs vs agents: understanding what each component does

12:29 From demos to deployment: where agents actually stand right now

16:20 Will AI agents be reliable by 2035? What the experts are saying

17:11 AI adoption and the digitally native advantage

18:17 What is the difference between an AI agent and agentic AI?

19:56 Agents vs orchestrators

25:27 The Ladder of Autonomy: a framework for understanding AI capability

26:25 Rung 1: Basic Workflows and Automations

What Is an AI Agent? A Plain-English Guide for Business Owners