AI Agents are becoming the mainstream trend of 2025 with the ability to support and replace humans in many jobs.
According to experts, one of the technology trends of 2025 is the proliferation of AI Agents - AI agents, "steppingstones" before humanity moves towards artificial superintelligence AGI.
According to Mr. Nguyen Hong Phuc, Director of Science at Conductify AI, artificial intelligence is a very special technology when its progress occurs much faster and more comprehensively than other technologies such as biotechnology or quantum computing. "On average, AI has a small breakthrough every two weeks, a big breakthrough every month, and last year created a breakthrough that changed everything," he said.
In 2024, humans will explore and teach AI many new capabilities in addition to the ability to generate text like ChatGPT in 2023. AI will gradually become a familiar application for creating images, videos, sounds, helping to create content and learn new knowledge. "However, the question remains: How will AI be applied to effectively change the way people work?", Mr. Phuc said.
Most AI models cannot completely change the way people work. OpenAI's GPT and o models, or a series of other names such as Google Gemini, Anthropic Claude, Meta Llama, DeepSeek are helping to speed up productivity. But humans still have to do the same job, just faster and do more. Until AI Agents are born.
What is an AI Agent?
At the end of 2024, major technology corporations and scientists around the world began to mention a keyword: AI Agent. In fact, this concept has appeared sporadically since 2023 to talk about the ability of artificial intelligence to support boring, repetitive tasks.
"Imagine AI doing customer service that can predict the needs of users before giving an answer, or AI managing network connections that can identify potential problems and handle them automatically, ensuring uninterrupted service," Liz Centoni, Director of Customer Experience at Cisco, told National Technology. "This will be a prominent trend in 2025, when AI is autonomous and automated, as well as integrated into personal devices, IoT, robots... to perform tasks in real-life situations".
According to Mr. Phuc, AI Agent can be understood as an artificial intelligence system that can operate automatically and make decisions based on specific goals set by humans.
"Unlike chatbots or virtual assistants that can only ask and answer questions, AI Agent is designed to perform complex tasks, interact with other systems, and sometimes work continuously without human intervention. In other words, it not only responds to questions like current chatbots but also proactively completes tasks and makes decisions when needed," said Mr. Phuc.
Meanwhile, Mr. Tran The Trung, Director of FPT Technology Research Institute, said that, in general, AI Agent is an automatic system that performs professional tasks "similar to the way humans or employees in the organization" but does not need human support or intervention and can still achieve high efficiency when acting.
According to IBM, AI Agent is a system or software that performs a series of tasks on behalf of humans, automatically, by designing its own task operation order and taking advantage of available tools.
Amazon defines AI Agent as a software program that can interact with its environment, collect and use data to perform self-defined tasks to achieve predetermined goals. Humans set goals, but an independent AI agent will choose the best actions it needs to take to achieve those goals.
What can AI Agent do this year?
According to Mr. Phuc, AI Agent is truly groundbreaking when compared to chatbots, when fundamentally changing from AI that only asks and answers to automatically performing work processes.
"Part of the dream of AI doing boring work for humans will happen as early as 2025," he said.
Technology expert Duy Luan assessed that AI Agents have the ability to "think for themselves" to a certain extent, as well as the ability to use the tools they are assigned. "Almost every field can apply AI Agents, the most common are controlling computers, searching and responding to information based on input answers, supporting customers...", Mr. Luan commented.
In fact, in the world, a number of large technology corporations are aiming to use AI Agents to replace employees. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in January that AI is increasingly powerful and will likely be able to perform the work of mid-level engineers in the company this year.
In December 2024, Salesforce, an American cloud data company, announced that it would not recruit any more software engineers in 2025 due to the significant increase in productivity thanks to AI. The company said it has developed a fully customizable, autonomous AI Agent that connects to enterprise data and performs tasks in sales, customer service, marketing, and commerce.
Meanwhile, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman predicted that virtual workers would enter the workforce as early as this year. "I believe that in 2025, we could see AI Agents, or virtual workers, enter the workforce for the first time and dramatically change the productivity of companies," Altman wrote on his blog on January 6. "Putting great tools in the hands of people step by step will bring significant results, increasingly widely distributed."
In its forecast of 6 artificial intelligence trends that will explode in 2025, Microsoft Vietnam assessed that AI agents will "reshape work". "With significant advances in memory, reasoning and multimodal capabilities, AI Agents can handle complex tasks with more sophisticated skills and interactions," the company predicts.
Sharing the same view, Mr. Nguyen Nhu Dung, Managing Director of Cisco Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia, predicted that AI will develop into a part of the workforce, able to perform some tasks instead of humans.