The six core capabilities of an agent

Strip an agent down and you find roughly six abilities working together. Understanding them is the fastest way to know what an agent can — and cannot — do for you.

Perception

The agent takes in the situation: your request, documents, data from other systems, or live inputs. It is the agent’s way of seeing what is going on before it acts.

Reasoning & planning

Instead of replying instantly, the agent thinks the goal through and breaks it into ordered steps — like writing itself a to-do list and deciding what to tackle first.

Tool use (function calling)

This is the highest-leverage ability: the agent reaches out and uses real software — searching, sending an email, running code, querying a database. You define tools; the model decides when to call one and returns a structured request your app executes.

Memory

The agent keeps context across a task (and sometimes across days), so each step does not start from zero and it stays consistent and personalized.

Autonomous multi-step execution

Given one goal, the agent runs a loop on its own: act, observe the result, adjust, and keep going across many steps until the job is done — without a human pressing each button.

Multi-agent collaboration

For bigger jobs, several specialized agents can team up, each handling the part it is good at, coordinated toward a shared goal.