Guardrails for AI Agents

Use-case specific validation tests and guardrails generation for Agentic AI

1. Introduction to Agentic AI

The discussion around ChatGPT (in general, generative AI), has now evolved into agentic AI. While ChatGPT is primarily a chatbot that can generate text responses, AI agents can execute complex tasks autonomously, e.g., make a sale, plan a trip, make a flight booking, book a contractor to do a house job, order a pizza. The figure below illustrates the evolution of agentic AI systems.

Fig. 1: Agentic AI evolution (Image by Author)

Bill Gates recently envisioned a future where we would have an AI agent that is able to process and respond to natural language and accomplish a number of different tasks. Gates used planning a trip as an example.

Ordinarily, this would involve booking your hotel, flights, restaurants, etc. on your own. But an AI agent would be able to use its knowledge of your preferences to book and purchase those things on your behalf.

1.1 Agentic AI Lifecycle

In this section, we do a deep-dive into the typical stages involved in building and operating such AI agents — illustrated in Fig. 2.