agents 17

The category is broad enough that two tools can both be called agents while working very differently. Some agents are workflow-based, executing a fixed sequence of actions when triggered. Others are goal-directed, meaning they interpret a high-level objective and plan the steps themselves. The latter are more flexible but also less predictable, which matters if you are building a production system. Key things to evaluate: what tools or APIs the agent can access, how it handles errors and ambiguous states, and how much human oversight is built in. Memory and context length also differ significantly between products. For business users, agents that connect to existing SaaS tools (Slack, HubSpot, Jira) tend to deliver value faster than those requiring custom integrations. Pricing structures vary from per-task tokens to monthly platform fees.