What Is an AI Agent? A Production Definition from the Field

Originally published on AIdeazz — cross-posted here with canonical link. Most "AI agent" definitions floating around are either academic abstractions or marketing fluff for glorified chatbots. After building and running multiple agent systems in production — from Telegram interfaces to multi-agent orchestration on Oracle Cloud — I've developed a more practical definition: An AI agent is software that observes its environment, decides on actions, executes them, and persists state across interacti