A chatbot answers. An agent acts. That's the short version, and it matters more than it sounds.
A chatbot is built to hold a conversation inside a defined scope — answering FAQs, qualifying a lead, routing a support ticket. It's reactive: someone asks, it responds, based on a script or a knowledge base it's been trained on.
An AI agent goes further. It can plan a sequence of steps, call tools or APIs, check its own output, and complete a task with minimal supervision — booking a shipment, reconciling an invoice against a purchase order, or pulling data from three systems to build a report. It's not just answering a question; it's doing the work.
The right starting point depends on the problem. If customers keep asking the same handful of questions, a well-trained chatbot solves that cheaply and fast. If your team spends hours a week on a repeatable multi-step task — data entry, document processing, cross-system reconciliation — that's agent territory, and the return on investment is measured in hours given back, not just faster replies.