Agents 101: What They Are, What They Aren’t

What you’ll learn:

There’s a lot of buzz around agents. Vendors tout them as the future of work. Headlines promise transformation. But for many, the term still feels slippery.

Do we mean smarter chatbots? AI-enabled workflows? Something else?

Let’s clear it up.

The Shift to Agentic AI

Imagine you’re prepping for a campaign. You need audience research, competitor analysis, and strategic recommendations, ideally delivered in a shareable PowerPoint.

Today, you might juggle emails, delegate to vendors, dig through dashboards, and manually compile slides—perhaps with some help from a chatbot.

Soon, you’ll be able to ask AI agents to do these long, complex, computer-using tasks autonomously. They’ll research, think, write, design, maybe even present. More like a colleague, less like a tool.

That’s true agentic AI. It will reshape our work and how we communicate with audiences. We have early versions today with research and coding agents, and more general, disruptive ones coming within 6–12 months.

But First: What Isn’t an Agent?

Because agents are the next big thing, the term gets overused. So, before defining what agents are, let’s be clear on what they’re not:

These are useful tools, but they’re not agents.

So What Is an Agent?

Think of an agent as a remote worker you can delegate to. You give it a goal, and it delivers results. It needs sufficient context, like any coworker, but no special prompting or training for your organization or tasks.

Today, you can access them via chat interfaces (like ChatGPT Agent), agentic browsers (like Perplexity Comet), or the terminal (like Claude Code). Some are specialized (such as for research and coding, as mentioned earlier), but increasingly, they’re general purpose. 

Agents:

That last trait is key. Traditional automation needs predefined steps. Agents explore strategies and sometimes invent better ones than you might have specified.

We saw this with AlphaGo, which found superior moves no human had discovered. DeepMind trained AlphaGo to play Go by letting it play against itself millions of times. Through this, it discovered moves humans missed for thousands of years. When it played them, like the famous “move 37,” people thought they were a mistake, but they proved to be brilliant.

Agentic AI brings that principle to knowledge work. You can assign agents tasks you don’t know how to do and, therefore, could never create a workflow to automate. 

Why Agents Matter for Life Sciences Commercialization

When thinking about the rise of agents, consider their direct impact on your work as well as how they’ll affect your communication with audiences.

Direct Impact: Agents Reshape How You Work

We’re moving from prompts to delegation.

Chat is powerful but synchronous and transactional. Agents are asynchronous and transformational. You can delegate complex tasks and trust agents to return with results, providing them only with required context and access to any relevant documents and tools. For example, ChatGPT’s Deep Research (a research agent)  searches for, reads, and synthesizes information into comprehensive, cited reports. This gives you hours—maybe days—of human-equivalent work in minutes.

Even better: you can run agents in parallel. Assign one to prep a media plan, another to draft copy, and a third to make a case for more budget. Unlike with jumping between multiple chat threads, agents run in the background and notify you when they complete their tasks. They can create multiple variations of the same desired output for you to choose from. They can even spin up sub-agents to help them do their work.

Managing agents will feel like managing people. You’ll need to onboard them to your business and the job you want them to do. You’ll need to give them clear direction and establish success criteria. You’ll need to provide them with context, file access, and tool access, but restrict this as you would for an employee in a similar role. And, you’ll need to review their work and provide feedback. That means new skills and structures: companies must empower humans to orchestrate agents. This will be similar to manager training, where people learn how to get the best performance from a team–only now that team will include both humans and AIs.

Indirect Impact: Agents Reshape Your Audience

But of course, agents won’t just change your work, they’ll also change how your audiences operate.

Doctors already use agents to complete prior authorization forms and even call insurers. Patients are using AI to understand symptoms and therapies, and soon, to enroll in support programs. Payers are processing documents and will almost certainly deploy agentic customer-service agents.

You’ll increasingly communicate through interfaces built for agents, not just humans. Agents will summarize your content for their users and act on it. They’ll proactively look for opportunities to help their users as well, such as by initiating research for new treatment options if they learn a current treatment isn’t working. Optimizing for agents will be a priority.

What Now?

This isn’t speculation–it’s already happening. Google’s AI modes let users automate search and even call businesses, for example. ChatGPT agents can operate autonomously, in the background, across websites in the cloud. Perplexity’s Comet browser lets an agent do things for users on their desktop. Claude Code provides engineers with a coding agent that itself delegates to sub-agents for faster, better outputs.

What we see from these early examples is that working with agents may actually feel easier than older tools. You can treat them like capable humans: provide context, define success, and give feedback.

Then start to dream bigger.

What if you had an army of remote workers? How would you elevate your role if the mundane disappeared? What could you try if you could create options in parallel and pick the best?

With agents, you can scale yourself.

The big question then is what will you do with that power and what higher-level tasks will you tackle when agents liberate you from many current burdens?

Klick Health is the world’s largest independent commercialization partner for life sciences and a leading full-service pharma marketing partner, serving as agency of record for leading pharma, biotech, and healthcare brands. Klick’s specialized offerings are rooted in deep medical and scientific understanding, including market insights, award-winning creative, and proprietary AI and data models to craft impactful brand narratives and seamless customer journeys. Backed by nearly 250 medical experts and advanced healthcare analytics, Klick delivers integrated marketing strategy and communications, from new product launch strategy to MLR review with real-world evidence, helping brands thrive in today’s complex healthcare landscape. Learn more at Klick.com.