AI Agents Demystified: Understand the New Species of Software — Before You Build It. The agentic spectrum, the autonomy dial, tools, teams, and ... 16 no-code labs (The AI Agent Series, Band 1) - Softcover

Inhaltsangabe

Everyone is selling you an "AI agent." This book gives you the instruments to know what you're actually looking at.

AI agents — software that pursues goals through its own loop of perceiving, deciding, and acting — are the most consequential shift in software since the internet. Yet the words around them (agent, agentic, copilot, autonomous, AI-native) are used so loosely that even professionals talk past each other. This book fixes that, hands-on, with no code required.

Through sixteen labs you can run with any mainstream AI assistant, and the story of one small business adopting agents week by week, you will learn to:

• Identify a true agent in minutes — goal, perception, decision, action, and who owns the loop


• Read an agent's trace like a receipt, and find exactly where a wrong answer went wrong


• Place any system on the classical five-rung ladder of agent minds — and locate today's LLM agents honestly on it


• Set the autonomy dial (L0–L5) from task reversibility, not vendor confidence


• Map an agent's action space — what it can read, write, and must never touch


• Know the four ways agents fail — including why they fail so confidently — and what professional trust really means


• Decide which parts of your work are agent-shaped, with the three delegation tests

Every chapter also digs deeper: a research lineage tracing each idea to its sources (from 1940s cybernetics and Shakey the robot to ReAct and MCP, from aviation's autonomy research to the Air Canada chatbot ruling), a failure catalog drawn from real incidents, a worked professional artifact — an annotated trace, a written autonomy plan, a vendor-deck teardown — and five exercises that install the skills in your own work. A further-reading appendix routes every chapter into the literature by author and year.

Who it's for: business readers, managers, students, and curious professionals — no programming assumed. Builders will find it the fastest on-ramp to the rest of The AI Agent Series.

The AI Agent Series takes readers from first contact to professional mastery across seven volumes. This is Book 1: the map.

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