Defined term
Autonomous agent
An AI agent that completes a defined task without per-step human input.
An autonomous agent is configured to pursue a defined objective using LLM reasoning, retrieval, and tool use, with success criteria and a stop condition. True autonomy is bounded: production agents have rate limits, cost caps, output validation, escalation paths, and audit logs. Most useful production agents are partial: they handle 80% of cases end-to-end and route the rest to a human reviewer.
When it matters
When you need end-to-end task completion with measurable success criteria — not just an answer, an executed outcome. Bound autonomy explicitly with rate limits, cost caps, and approval queues for high-impact actions.
Real example
A research agent that takes a target account list, gathers public signals (news, hiring, funding) for each, scores buying intent, and returns a ranked outreach plan with evidence — 0 human input between submit and review.
KPIs to watch
Task completion rate (>80% target), cost per completed task ($0.10-$2.00 typical), escalation rate to human (<20%).
Related terms
Agentic AI
AI systems that can plan, take multi-step actions, and use tools to complete tasks autonomously.
Tool use
An LLM's ability to call external functions, APIs, or services within a generation step.
Guardrails
Pre and post checks that filter unsafe, off-topic, or non-compliant model outputs.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
Generation grounded in retrieved source documents rather than the model's parametric memory alone.
See it in action
We use this every week
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