A clear-headed guide to agentic AI

What the Heck
Is an AI Agent?

Everything you need to know about AI agents. No coding. No hype.

The technology is moving fast. This book helps you understand what is real, what matters, and how to talk about AI agents with confidence.

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Cover of What the Heck Is an AI Agent? by Shikhar Sharma

Finally, a useful answer

Understand the technology without becoming a technologist.

Know what makes an agent an agent

See how agents differ from ordinary chatbots and why that difference changes what they can do.

Recognize agents in the real world

Explore practical examples in the tools, workplaces, and services already around you.

Use AI with your eyes open

Understand the limits, risks, privacy questions, and habits that help you stay in control.

No code. No jargon. No panic.

For people who want clarity, not another tutorial.

AI agents are appearing in meetings, headlines, and product announcements. But the conversation often assumes you already speak the language.

What the Heck Is an AI Agent? starts where you are. Through familiar examples and plain English, it explains how agents perceive, reason, use tools, and act - without asking you to write a line of code.

Read it your way

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Shikhar Sharma

About the author

Shikhar Sharma

Shikhar Sharma is a Principal Applied Scientist at Microsoft with over a decade of experience in Artificial Intelligence and Deep Learning. During his career at Microsoft, he has contributed to AI initiatives across Microsoft Bing, Microsoft Turing, Microsoft Weather, and Microsoft Research, including Microsoft's flagship LLM-based AI digital assistant, Copilot, formerly known as Sydney. He currently leads a team of data scientists and machine learning engineers powering Bing's Visual Search and image recommendations.

Before joining Microsoft, Shikhar was a Research Scientist at Maluuba, an AI startup acquired by Microsoft in 2017. He earned an MSc in Computer Science from the University of Toronto, where he studied with the university's Deep Learning and Machine Learning group, and a BTech in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kanpur. He has published research with leading AI academics, including Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Yoshua Bengio, Ashutosh Saxena, Thorsten Joachims, and Graham Taylor, and holds several patents in the field of AI.