AAAI presidential panel – AI agents

Joudy Bourghli & The Bigger Picture / The Omnipresent Tapestry / Licenced by CC-BY 4.0

The Future of AI Research report, published in March 2025, aims to clearly identify the trajectory of AI research in a structured way. The report was led by outgoing AAAI President Francesca Rossi and covers 17 different AI topics. Members of the report team, and other selected AI practitioners, are taking part in a series of video panel discussions covering selected chapters from the report.

In the fifth discussion in the collection, the three panellists tackle the topic of AI agents. Specifically, they cover the following topics:

• How multi-agent systems evolved from rule-based systems to complex cooperative frameworks built on generative AI, and what is really different in the modern notion of an agentic AI system.
• The opportunities and challenges of agentic AI; exploring how LLMs enable more flexible decision-making while introducing new questions around efficiency, complexity, open-endedness, trust, and reliability.
• How to address issues of alignment and governance in agentic AI systems.

Panel Members

• Atoosa Kasirzadeh, Carnegie Mellon University
• Kartik Talamadupula, Oracle
• Michael Wooldridge, University of Oxford

Moderator

• Francesca Rossi, AAAI past president, IBM Fellow and AI Ethics Global Leader

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.

Lucy Smith is Senior Managing Editor for AIhub.