Is Alexa an AI agent?

Alexa is great at the things she's great at: turning off your lights, playing a playlist, adding milk to your shopping list, reading the weather. Little jobs, one at a time.

An AI agent, on the other hand, plans several steps and follows through. Ask an agent to "organize a birthday party for 8 people next Saturday" and it can pull that off. Ask Alexa the same thing and she'll probably suggest a playlist called "Birthday Party."

Amazon is working on a more agent-like version called Alexa+, and it's genuinely closer to what we mean by an AI agent. If you have that one, you're closer to "yes" than "no."