Artificial Intelligence is moving swiftly forward—no longer are ChatGPT and Claude the latest news. Now, sophisticated businesses and other organizations are designing AI agents that will replace mundane human tasks.

Several agents working together are likely to replace humans in the workplace in the coming years. Barclays has reported that there will soon be 1.5 billion to 22 billion individual agents working on specific tasks, either alone or with others.

Below are four terms to understand as you lead your own organization forward in this new AI era.

Large Language Model (LLM) – An LLM is an artificial intelligence system trained on massive amounts of text data to understand, summarize, translate, and generate human-like language. (Definition from Google’s Gemini.) Examples of LLMs are ChatGPT and Claude.

AI Agents – An AI agent is unlike a traditional chatbot or prompt-based LLM. An AI agent can take a specific human action and, by writing and running code, replace that human action. Agents can continuously adapt to subtle job changes. One agent works with others to produce an agentic AI system. For example, AI agents can be trained to work together to complete multiple tasks, such as creating written records, digitally filing those records, and then creating a summary report from those records. Agentic AI is expected to impact the workplace.

Swarm – An AI swarm is a group of agents that work together to accomplish a shared goal. That goal isn't necessarily malign or destructive, as it appeared in the news regarding the Hugging Face break-in last summer. (Please refer to our October newsletter for more information.) For example, hospitals could deploy agents to retrieve patient records and perform other administrative tasks, such as coordinating admissions. A swarm could also be tasked with advancing biomedical research. (From CBS News)

Swarm Chasers – This refers to a recently formed group of AI researchers who are studying swarms and their purposes. (Read about swarm researchers here.)