If you are wondering what the next big thing in artificial intelligence (AI) is—what 2024 holds for us—I can tell you right now that it’s AI agents. No doubt about it. Their capabilities are exciting, a little scary and essentially unknown. For legal practitioners, the issues that AI agents raise are complex.

There are a number of different definitions of AI agents (sometimes called AI assistants), but they share the following characteristics: a multimodal large language model (LLM) that can autonomously and sequentially carry out multidimensional goals, and that require it to move between domains and call on various tools or APIs to do so.