According to Gartner, an agent doesn’t have to be an AI model. It can also be a software program or another computational entity — or a robot. When multiple independent but interactive agents are combined, each capable of perceiving the environment and taking actions, you get a multiagent system.
And, yes, enterprises are already deploying them. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, for example, uses multiagent systems to ensure its clean rooms stay clean so nothing contaminates flight hardware bound for other planets.
Starting in 2018, the agency used agents, in the form of Raspberry PI computers running biologically-inspired neural networks and time series models, as the foundation of a cooperative network of sensors.
