"In practical terms, a chat interface is reactive - it responds to a prompt and maybe calls a tool once or twice. What makes something truly agentic is the reasoning capability and ability to work toward a concrete goal. An agent breaks work into steps, reasons through decisions, tracks its progress, and continues until it feels it has adequately met that goal - or knows it should stop and ask for help."
"The ones that ship are the ones that automate tasks requiring a lot of effort that are repeatable and well-bounded."
Jeff Hollan, Partner Director of Product at Microsoft, distinguishes AI agents from chat interfaces with tools based on their reasoning capabilities and goal-oriented behavior. Chat interfaces are reactive, responding to prompts with limited tool usage, while true agents break work into steps, reason through decisions, track progress, and continue until goals are met or help is needed. Enterprise teams find success deploying agents for automating repetitive, well-bounded tasks requiring significant effort. Hollan leads Microsoft's Agent Platform, building infrastructure enabling developers to create, deploy, and manage enterprise AI agents at scale. His background includes leadership roles at Snowflake and Microsoft Azure, where he directed serverless and PaaS services.
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