You draw a sharp distinction between AI chatbots and AI agents. What is the fundamental difference?

People often conflate agents and chatbots because the earliest agents happened to use chat windows, but they are entirely different concepts. A chatbot is simply a conversational user interface. An agent is a fundamental evolution of software. An agent is an intelligent, proactive application that deeply understands you, anticipates your context, takes actions on your behalf, and can communicate with other agents. Chatbots are reactive and text-bound, whereas agents can take any interface form factor, visual, tactile, or voice, and coordinate complex tasks autonomously.