What’s the difference between AI assistants, copilots, and agents?

Artificial intelligence has become a bit like a pop band. You might be familiar with the iconic hits — automating repetitive manual tasks, powering through advanced data analytics, and making intelligent decisions — but you might be less confident identifying each individual band member and their role in delivering those performances.

Once seen as a solo artist, the world is now noticing the distinct characters that make up AI, including assistants, copilots, and agents — each with different abilities (and limitations). When businesses use these concepts interchangeably or inaccurately, it’s not just confusing. It also makes it hard to know which AI solution to implement to achieve the best ROI. As a result, businesses end up merely scratching the surface of AI’s opportunities — which can mean the difference between negligible returns or millions of dollars in value.

So let’s introduce the members of the AI band. Here’s a breakdown of AI assistants, copilots, and agents: what they are, what they’re good at and, perhaps most importantly, what they need to play together effectively.

Fancy an AI-themed business trip? Get our ebook, Destination AI, to explore different AI solutions through a short story, set on an exotic island, about a manager tasked with pulling off a company event that seems impossible — until AI comes to the rescue.

What are AI assistants?

We’ll kick off with the most basic of the three AI solutions.

Definition of AI assistants

AI assistants use data to make recommendations, such as how to improve an underperforming or blocked business process. Come to an AI assistant with a business problem or question (ask it what’s causing slow-moving inventory or late customer deliveries, for example) and it will analyze data from your business systems to pinpoint the answer. AI assistants can even rank their suggested actions by priority, telling you which to start with to unlock the greatest uplift in KPIs like customer satisfaction. (Spoiler alert: AI copilots and agents can do all this too.)

If you’re unsure about AI assistants’ ease of use, you’ll be glad to know they’re trained to allow you to talk to them as you would a colleague (minus the water-cooler chat). And the AI will also show you the reasoning behind its recommendations, so you can check their suitability before taking action.

What the humble AI assistant isn’t capable of, however, is executing these recommendations. In short, it’s a handy diagnostic tool, but you’ll need to implement the optimizations yourself.

Key benefits of AI assistants

• Investigate business problems and analyze data significantly faster.
• Improve business problem-solving with in-depth insights that may not be apparent to teams.
• Get an objective view of business processes, without subjective impressions, bias or misconceptions around how they actually run.
• Gain more insights and organizational transparency from your business data.

What are AI copilots?

If AI assistants can write the music but need you to sing it, AI copilots can do their own songwriting and — as long as it’s simple — perform it too.

Definition of AI copilots

Copilots, in contrast to assistants, are able to execute the recommendations they make after analyzing and reasoning through your company data. This extends to automatically notifying teams using reminders or alerts you set up.

The caveat is that, despite being able to suggest solutions to complex questions, AI copilots can only execute simple tasks. If plant equipment fails, for example, you can ask an AI copilot to find spare parts from another plant. But while the copilot might evaluate each plant’s proximity and lead time, and even compare plants with suitable alternatives instead of exact-match replacements to calculate the best overall solution, it wouldn’t arrange delivery for you. And, unlike their more advanced counterparts (which we’ll come on to next), AI copilots need continuous prompting with questions, rather than running in the background.

Key benefits of AI copilots

• Improve business reactivity by formulating and mobilizing faster responses to disruption, including automated alerts.
• Increase efficiency with problem-solving and basic decision-making.
• Boost team productivity by offloading routine manual tasks like transferring data across records and systems, while enhancing accuracy with less human error.
• Get faster answers to understanding complex service issues and areas of underperformance.

What are AI agents?

The stars of our AI band are AI agents. These all-singing, all-dancing AI solutions can do it all: write the tunes and perform them at full belt — no matter how complicated the melodies.

Definition of AI agents

AI agents can reason through a complex business problem, create a plan, and execute each action (whether they’re simple or not).

AI agents are powerful thanks to their advanced reasoning and their ability to take actions sequentially. This means that once you set the AI agent to work towards a given outcome, it’ll work out the steps to achieve it, and then execute those steps while taking into account the outcomes of the previous ones. And all while running independently in the background without constant prompting.

Another key feature that differentiates AI agents from assistants and copilots is their ability to improve themselves over time. As long as the AI agent is sufficiently advanced, it can continuously learn more about the unique, nuanced needs of your business, enabling it to provide and implement more appropriate recommendations.

Key benefits of AI agents

• Save time, as agents can be left to run in the background once configured.
• Maximize efficiency with both advanced problem-solving and decision-making combined.
• Achieve greater ROI as the technology becomes continuously smarter, adapted and more closely tailored to your business.
• Improve business proactivity with ongoing process monitoring to catch service issues before they arise.

What is AI orchestration technology?

The three members of the AI supergroup are similar in that they all connect to live, real-time company data, can be based on any large language model, and can explain their reasoning. But their differences lie in the complexity of their problem-solving, their ability to execute actions, and their need for prompting.

Now, what about using these AI solutions harmoniously? What’s a band without a manager, after all?

Even advanced AI agents can only work towards one outcome at a time. And if you want to deploy assistants, copilots, and agents together, you’ll need the guiding hand of AI orchestration technology to coordinate them across people, processes, and systems. That could translate into:

• One AI agent detects a procurement issue and enlists an alternative supplier;
• A second agent processes the PO for the new supplier and reconciles payment with the original one;
• A third agent calculates the impact on customer delivery before sending out an update.

Successful AI orchestration also requires process visibility and a seamless flow of data. The Celonis Process Intelligence platform can help you clearly see the best opportunities for AI implementation across your workflows. It also gives any AI assistant, copilot, or agent the business context it needs to make the best decisions. Ultimately, whichever solution you choose, there’s no AI without PI.

Complex concepts like AI are best explained with a good story. So get our e-book, Destination AI, written in the style of a short novel, to follow the journey of a manager struggling to deliver an ambitious company event — until AI assistants, copilots, and agents save the day.

Or check out our AI cheat sheet for a handy overview of the different features of AI assistants, copilots and agents — and how orchestration helps them work together.