What is an AI agent?
A chatbot answers what you type. An AI agent goes further: it is given a job and does it on its own — it decides which data to look at, uses tools to fetch it, works out the answer and delivers it, sometimes without anyone asking first.
For a business, the most useful way to think about an AI agent is as a worker with a job description. Some companies call them AI workers for exactly that reason. The job description is what matters: what the agent may read, what it may do, who it answers to, and who checks its work.
That is also where most of the confusion comes from. "AI agent" is used both for software that answers a manager's question about sales, and for software that sends e-mails to customers or changes orders in the ERP. Those are very different jobs with very different risks.
Two kinds of AI agents
| Agents that answer and watch | Agents that act | |
|---|---|---|
| What they do | Read data, answer questions, send reports and alerts to your team | Create, change or send things inside your systems or to outside people |
| Examples | "Sales this month by branch?" · a Sunday report · an alert when stock runs low | Update a CRM record · send an offer to a customer · open a purchase order |
| If they are wrong | A wrong answer — someone can check it before acting | A wrong transaction — already in the system or already sent |
| What they need | Access to the data, permissions, a log | A defined scope, permissions, approval where needed, a log |
Both kinds have their place. Agents that act do best on well-defined tasks with clear rules and a person approving where it matters. And for most companies the first big win is simple: getting the right number to the right person, quickly, without anyone pulling a report.
Start with answers, add business process automation with control
- Answers come first. A few weeks of real questions show where the time goes — and which processes are worth automating.
- Every automation has a clear scope. What it does, in which system and on what trigger — written down and agreed before it runs.
- The system owners stay in control. The agent works under the permissions they set, with a person approving the steps that need one.
- Everything is logged. Every question, every answer and every action can be checked afterwards.
This is how WizBI works. It connects to your systems — Priority, SAP, monday.com, SQL databases, Excel and Google Sheets, documents and more — and its AI workers answer, watch and report. On top of that, we build automations around your processes on request: each one defined with you, running under the permissions you set, every action logged.
Concrete jobs for AI agents that answer and watch
Answering the team's questions
Managers, finance, sales and operations ask in plain language, in WhatsApp, Microsoft Teams, Slack, Telegram, e-mail or the web, and get numbers, charts, tables and Excel or PDF files from the company's own data. One question can draw on several systems at once — for example the ERP and a spreadsheet.
Scheduled reports
A sales summary every Sunday at 08:00, debt by age at the start of each month — delivered as a message or an Excel or PDF file in the same chat. Ask for it once; it keeps arriving.
Threshold alerts
The agent watches the data and writes when a figure crosses a line you set: stock below a minimum, a customer's debt above a limit, sales below target.
These are the jobs WizBI's AI workers do, around the clock, on top of one company brain that knows the business, its terms and its permissions. See WizBI in WhatsApp and AI for management for examples by channel and by role.
How to evaluate an AI agent for your business
Before approving any AI agent, ask the vendor:
- What can it do, and who decides? Get a clear answer on what the agent may read and do in each system, and who approves its actions.
- Does it respect our permissions? A sales rep should not see payroll through the agent. Check that permissions apply per person and on every channel.
- Is every question and answer logged? You need to be able to check who asked what and what came back.
- Where does our data go, and is it used for training? Ask where it runs, under what terms the AI models run, and whether your data trains them.
- Is the vendor certified? An outside certification such as ISO 27001 means someone independent checks the security controls.
- Where does the team use it? An agent people have to log into competes with everything else. One that answers in the chat they already use gets used.
- Can we start small? One system, real questions, a few weeks. If a vendor needs a large project before the first answer, that is a warning sign.
For WizBI: permissions by organisation, group and user; automations defined with you; every question logged; runs on Google Cloud with AI models under enterprise terms and customer data not used for training; WIZBI AI LTD is ISO/IEC 27001:2022 certified. For the data side of the question, see Is it safe to put company data into ChatGPT?.