What is the difference between an AI agent and a chatbot?
A chatbot answers. An agent acts. An agent retrieves information, reasons over it, uses tools and systems, and changes the state of something: it submits an application, issues a certificate, books a facility, routes an approval. Because it changes state, it needs authorisation, logging and human checkpoints, which a chatbot does not.
How long until an agent is live?
A first production service typically takes one quarter, covering assessment, the governance layer and one complete end-to-end service. Subsequent services are substantially faster because the platform, connectors and policies already exist. The second service is configuration rather than invention.
Are we locked into one AI model or framework?
No. The runtime is abstracted and models are swappable, including in-country sovereign and open-weight models. A model or vendor change becomes a configuration decision rather than a rebuild.
Can an agent work with our existing approval rules?
Yes, and it should. Approval routing, delegation and escalation are modelled explicitly rather than learned, so the agent follows the same rules your staff do, and you can read those rules without opening the code.