US WEEK 2 · MON 9 NOV 2026 · US AND THEM
Assistant, agent, autopilot: three words for three jobs
A plain-English way to tell them apart by how much they do without asking.
Vendors use “agent” for almost everything now. Gartner has a name for it, “agent washing”, and estimates only about 130 of the thousands of claimed agentic AI vendors are the real thing [S1]. So let’s use plain words based on one question: how much does it do without asking?
| Word | Does | A person… |
|---|---|---|
| Assistant | Answers, drafts, summarises when asked | decides and acts, every time |
| Agent | Takes a goal, plans steps, uses tools and data | sets the goal and approves some steps |
| Autopilot | Runs a whole process on a trigger or schedule | owns the process and checks outcomes |
Why it matters
Each step along that line moves a decision away from a person. That isn’t bad; it’s often the point. But it should be a decision someone makes on purpose, not something that creeps in when a helpful assistant gets a connector, then a schedule, then permission to send.
Try this
List five AI tools your team used this week. For each, write A (assistant), G (agent) or P (autopilot). Then ask: who decided it should work that way? If the answer is “nobody”, you’ve found next week’s topic.
DRAFT SEED POST · PART OF THE 52-WEEK PLAN IN DOCS/04-BLOG-PLAN.MD