AI Agents, visually explained

The difference between Agents vs Assistants vs Automations

Mar 31, 2025

Hey friends 👋

I’ve been heads down working on an introductory workshop for the NIGP VCON conference I got invited to next month. I’m turning the 7-part series I started earlier this year into a 1-hour session that covers how AI works, what it can do, and what it can’t do. If you’re interested in this type of workshop for your company or team, email me at fawzi@year2049.com and we’ll set it up.

Today, I wanted to talk about the AI term we’ve been flooded with this year: AI Agents. It gets confusing when terms like “agents”, “assistants”, and “automations” are used interchangeably even when they represent different concepts and capabilities.

As always, here’s a short visual explainer that is still fully hand-drawn even though OpenAI’s 4o image generation got a mind-blowing update last week (that’ll be the topic of my next newsletter in a few days).

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