Abstract
Technology is rapidly evolving, with the use and adoption of AI agents on the rise. This paper presents a critical review of the evolution, architectures, applications, and future directions of AI agents. This review brings to fore the fact that currently, Ai agents had become highly sophisticated, with an ability to execute tasks that are complex across several fields of such as business, health and medicine and cybersecurity. However, despite these benefits, there still exist concerns such as limited reasoning, inefficient context management, and idea generalisation. Other challenges of AI agents include algorithmic bias and privacy violations. To address the identified challenges, this paper suggests that for future works on AI agents should prioritise coming up with architectures with advanced reasoning, efficient and good memory usage, AI-human collaboration, introduction of standardised frameworks, and applications of AI in scientific discovery. The contribution of this work to the existing body of academic discussion is a comprehensive assessment of AI agents, showing the capabilities, challenges, and the areas for future development. Although AI agents promise great advantages, the utilisation of these goods that it promises depends on clear understanding to the challenges, limitations and the inherent ethical and security risks and providing clear and timely solutions through continued interdisciplinary research and engagements.