Intro
Contact centers across the globe are adopting AI to improve customer service, streamline operations, and reduce costs. AI within organizations is now commonplace, with 78% of all businesses saying they use AI in at least one business function.1
With the growth of AI on a global scale, there have never been more products, tools, and technologies offered to your enterprise. Though many of these tools share similar functionality that relies on Generative AI, Conversational AI with NLU, or a combination of both, they are often described in vastly different ways depending on the provider.
This is evident in comparing an AI Agent and an AI Assistant. Though both tools rely on similar technology to operate, their function and scope make them distinct. We’ll explore this in detail down below, but the headline differences are:
- AI Assistants, made popular by the likes of Alexa and Siri, are reactive and rely on user prompts to execute a task.
- AI Agents are often associated with Agentic AI. They are proactive and capable of autonomous action. They can identify tasks, plot goals, and follow them – all without human intervention.
In this article, we’ll break down the difference between an AI Agent and an AI Assistant to make sure you make the right choice when adopting AI in your contact center…
(Please note: there are often overlaps between these two terms, and many AI providers use them interchangeably. Here at Cognigy, we use AI Agent as our preferred term for both process-driven and more autonomous AI Agents.)