Imagine giving your AI a job — and it hires a few more AIs to help, splits up the work, reviews their outputs and hands you the polished result. That is the promise of AI agents, much touted by tech companies since the middle of last year.

Rather than being extensions of large language models like Google Gemini and ChatGPT, agents are independent software processes with goals, memory and responsibilities. Not only are they capable of working on tasks over time, but they can also operate alongside other agents...