“AI agent” has become an overloaded term, applied to everything from glorified cron jobs to brittle prompt chains. In this talk, we challenge the hype and ask a simple question: what actually qualifies as an AI agent?

We’ll break down common misconceptions, examine real-world implementations, and contrast agent-like systems with workflows, automations, and orchestration pipelines that are often mislabeled. Through concrete examples, we’ll explore autonomy, planning, memory, feedback loops, and failure modes, and show where most systems quietly fall short.

The goal is not to define yet another framework, but to give practitioners a clear mental model to reason about agents, avoid architectural self-deception, and build systems that deserve the name.