Harrison Chase, LangChain CEO and co-founder, takes the stage at Cisco Live! to discuss ambient agents. Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET
Until recently, AI solutions that can execute tasks on your behalf seemed futuristic. Now the era of AI agents is here, with nearly every company offering its own solution. On the horizon, though, is a more advanced and even more promising milestone -- ambient agents.
On day three of the Cisco Live! conference, LangChain CEO and co-founder Harrison Chase took the stage to discuss ambient agents, a concept pioneered by his San Francisco-based company. As the name implies, these agents take cues from their environment to commit actions rather than waiting for human input.
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What are ambient agents (and the perks)?
Currently, the AI assistance that users receive is deterministic; that is, humans are expected to enter a command in order to receive an intended outcome. With ambient agents, there is a shift in how humans fundamentally interact with AI to get the desired outcomes they need; the AI assistants rely instead on environmental cues.
"Ambient agents we define as agents that are triggered by events, run in the background, but they are not completely autonomous," said Chase.
He explains that ambient agents benefit employees by allowing them to expand their magnitude and scale themselves in ways they could not previously do. Rather than 1:1 interactions between human employees and agents, ambience enables up to millions of agents to run in the background simultaneously. Instead of being limited to the number of chat windows you can use, you can instead rely on the agents to initiate their own, in response to environmental cues.
It's similar to the concept of ambient computing or ubiquitous computing, which blends computing power into our everyday lives in a way that is embedded into our surroundings to power experiences such as smart home ecosystems. Instead of individually turning on every power switch, an assistant can pick up on cues, such as the sun dimming, to execute a set of actions.
Ambient agents in the enterprise could accomplish a similar goal, with these AI assistants orchestrating workflows and even working with others to reach desired outcomes without human intervention to kick them off, unless it is of maximum importance. These AI agents combine human reasoning with the speed and intelligence of advanced AI models, unlocking new capabilities we have not been able to access before.
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