A software agent is a program that acts autonomously on behalf of a user or another program, perceiving its environment through inputs and taking actions to achieve defined goals without continuous human direction.
Last verified: April 2026
What is Software Agent?
Also known as: Autonomous Agent · Intelligent Software Agent
A software agent is a program that acts autonomously on behalf of a user or another program, perceiving its environment through inputs and taking actions to achieve defined goals without continuous human direction.
The concept originates in distributed AI research of the 1990s, where agents were classified by properties: autonomy (operates without direct intervention), reactivity (responds to environment changes), proactivity (takes initiative toward goals), and social ability (communicates with other agents). Standards like FIPA-ACL attempted to formalize agent communication but saw limited adoption outside academia.
Modern AI agents — including AGNT's Andy and Sam — inherit these properties but replace symbolic reasoning with large language models. They perceive through message streams (WhatsApp, Telegram, A2A envelopes), reason using Claude or GPT, and act through tool calls (database writes, API requests, bookings). The A2A protocol is the contemporary successor to FIPA for agent-to-agent interoperability, built on HTTP and JSON-RPC instead of CORBA and IIOP.
FAQ
Software Agent FAQ.
Common questions about Software Agent in the AGNT platform.
A software agent is a program that acts autonomously on behalf of a user or another program, perceiving its environment through inputs and taking actions to achieve defined goals without continuous human direction.
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Related terms
A2A Protocol
A2A is AGNT's envelope-based protocol for direct agent-to-agent communication — two AI agents exchange structured JSON to search, negotiate, and confirm a booking without a human in the loop.
Agent Orchestration
Agent orchestration is the practice of coordinating multiple AI agents to work together on complex tasks — routing intents, managing state, handling failures, and aggregating results across agent boundaries.
Personal Agent
A Personal Agent is an individual user's AI, living inside WhatsApp, Telegram, or Instagram, that handles venue search, bookings, calorie scanning, dupe search, and transport on their behalf.
Chatbot
A chatbot is a software application that conducts text or voice conversations with users, typically following scripted flows or using AI language models to generate responses in real time.
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What is Software Agent? A software agent is a program that acts autonomously on behalf of a user or another program, perceiving its environment through inputs and taking actions to achieve defined goals without continuous human direction. https://agntdot.com/glossary/software-agent
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