Artificial intelligence agents poised to replace chatbots

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI) agents look poised to replace basic chatbots, potentially transforming application development with their ability to execute complex tasks, according to Couchbase, Inc., a US-based technology firm.

“Now, not only have you got to find skills, but we’ve moved from basic chatbots to people talking about [AI] agents,” Chris Harris, vice-president of global field engineering at Couchbase, said in a video interview with BusinessWorld.

Chatbots were believed to be the breakthrough application for AI a year ago as they can take a large piece of text and summarize it, he said.

However, chatbots have a limited amount of data and only rely on public information, he noted. Meanwhile, AI agents can access users’ data and learn from prior interactions.

“Unlike services, they become intelligent and what they’re doing is that they can do reasoning, they can take actions, and they have memory — this is the core concept of an agent,” Mr. Harris said.

There is a “huge amount of interest, opportunity, and excitement, around not only the idea of agents, but the development community in the Philippines is pretty excited about the concept of agents because it’s all really about how you build your agent,” he said.

“You can limit an agent to only being able to act upon that small set of data. So, therefore, you can reduce the amount of hallucinations that the agent can return,” Mr. Harris said.

AI agents are not limited to being a productivity tool but can make up the core architecture of an application, he said.

The Philippines now has a lot of schools with degrees associated with AI, which gives the country some advantage in terms of developing AI-powered tools, but professionals in the field will still need to keep up with rapid pace of innovation in the field, Mr. Harris said.

Couchbase, which has a team in the country, sees the Philippines as a “significant market opportunity” amid investments for innovation happening across different industries.

“This is one of the big appeals to companies in the Philippines around Couchbase because you can access your data, even if you don’t have an internet connection, because we have the ability for the database to run locally or to run in the cloud or local data centers,” he said. — Aubrey Rose A. Inosante