The Anatomy of an AI Agent - Part 2
How AI Agents Think: Decision-Making & Autonomy
Ever Wondered How AI Agents Think? Here’s the Truth—Most Don’t.
In Part 1, we talked about the basics of this emerging technology and how AI agents are everywhere—at least, that’s what the marketing says.
But when you look under the hood, most of these ‘agents’ aren’t much more than glorified chatbots with function-calling capabilities.
They execute tasks, but do they really ‘think’? Do they adapt, learn, or remember?
That’s where things get interesting.
So, what does it actually mean for an AI agent to think?
Thinking isn’t just spitting out a response from a language model. It’s about making decisions, applying quality metrics and operating with controlled autonomy.
Today, we’re going to break down the three main pillars of AI agent cognition:
Decision-Making – How agents decide what to do next.
Quality - How agents decide what’s good and what’s rubbish.
Autonomy – What agents do with new information to improve their actions.
By the end of this, you’ll understand how I’ve gone about building cognition into my own software to create AI agents that can actually do some thinking.
Let’s get into it.