A few asked on last week's "what's new" webinar about what an agent entailed and how different it was from an assistant, which our users and those of predecessor watsonx Assistant are familiar with.

They both are entities that can converse with the user and take action to retrieve/push data or take action in various systems on behalf of the user.

The key difference is that agents are more autonomous and dynamic, more LLM-driven, able to work without so much upfront prescription.

Assistants on the other hand require a specific set of behaviors / actions defined in order to more predicatively address the user's needs.

Both have their use, pros/cons, and we do foresee our customers to use both, more or less depending on the domain/industry, the context, the user persona.

The new AI agent chat can be seen as a supervisory agent, allowing a mix of agents and assistants to address the users need through a single (embeddedable) point of entry, using is LLM (Large Language Model) to route request appropriately across any number of agents/assistants made accessible to the given user. 

Looking forward to you feedback here or at https://watson-orchestrate.ideas.ibm.com/ on what you would expect from assistants and/or agents.

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Laurent de Clermont-Tonnerre
Watson Orchestrate Product Manager
IBM
San Francisco
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Another attendee asked "is the agent only helping in selecting the right assistant?" and "it has access to skills and other tools as well?"

Someone else asked/commented "What could we expect in the Agentic AI landscape as described in the slides (Autonomy, automatic tools calling, etc.)? Now the demo seemed like a pre-described Assistant flow)"

More to come next month in our SaaS version as well as on the next episode of "what's new in watsonx Orchestrate" to be announced soon.

We will indeed introduce the ability for the AI agent chat to directly route to skills / tools, laying the path for more dynamic orchestration of work across various system. Much more in 2025, keep an eye here, in-app and at https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/watsonx/watson-orchestrate/current?topic=notes-whats-new-in-watsonx-orchestrate

The demo showed what is available as of today which is indeed routing between different AI assistants. 

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Laurent de Clermont-Tonnerre
Watson Orchestrate Product Manager
IBM
San Francisco
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