# What is an AI agent?

An AI agent is a model given tools, context, and a goal, running in a loop until the work is done: reading systems, taking actions, and escalating to humans when policy requires. Unlike a chatbot that only answers, an agent completes tasks such as triaging claims or clearing disputes.

Production agents need guardrails more than intelligence: sandboxed execution, audited tool grants, spend caps, and human escalation paths. The failure mode of an ungoverned agent is not wrong answers but wrong actions.

A fleet of narrow agents, each owning one workflow with clear metrics, consistently outperforms one general assistant. That is the architecture Allocate’s console is built around.

## See also

- [See Cloud Agents](https://allocate.network/agents)
- [AI agent cost calculator](https://allocate.network/tools/ai-agent-cost-calculator)

## Related terms

- [Inference](https://allocate.network/glossary/inference.md)
- [Model routing](https://allocate.network/glossary/model-routing.md)
- [Training signal](https://allocate.network/glossary/training-signal.md)

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