Agent
"Agent" is an old and broad word: in everyday and academic use it just means something that acts, whether a person, an organization, or a piece of software. In modern AI it has a narrower sense. An AI agent is a system, usually built around a large language model, that can take actions and use tools (searching the web, running code, calling other software, editing files) to pursue a goal over several steps, instead of producing a single response and stopping. It decides what to do next based on what it finds along the way.
This is what makes something like automated scraping far more capable than before: an agent can navigate many sources, follow leads, and assemble what it gathers with little supervision. That autonomy is also brings risks. The model at the center is still probabilistic, so mistakes can compound across steps rather than being caught in a single answer, and an agent acting on its own can send data to many tools and services, raising the same data sovereignty and consent questions at a larger scale.