Personal agent – Definition & Meaning

Definition of personal agent

: an AI agent that works for one person over the long term: it remembers their preferences, connects to their accounts such as email, calendar, and shopping, and carries out tasks for them, often in the background and through ordinary messaging apps
- I texted my personal agent to move Friday's dinner, and it rescheduled the booking and told everyone.
- Her personal agent clears her inbox every morning before she wakes up.

Origin & history

first known use1990s

Researchers such as Pattie Maes at MIT built 'personal assistant' software agents in the early 1990s for tasks like scheduling meetings and filtering email. The phrase came back in 2026, when the open-source OpenClaw project went viral and large tech companies began preparing consumer personal agents.

Test yourself

Which of these is the meaning of personal agent?

Related terms

AI agent an AI system that can pursue a goal over many steps on its own, deciding what to do next… AI assistant an AI product that helps a person with everyday tasks such as answering questions, writing… memory a feature that lets an AI keep information about a user or task across separate conversations… background agent an AI agent that works on a task by itself in the cloud while you do something else, then… agentic commerce shopping in which AI agents search, compare, and buy products or services on a person's… prompt injection an attack in which hidden instructions are slipped into content an AI reads, such as a web…

Cite this entry

"Personal agent." AI Dictionary, Dadgogo, https://dadgogo.com/dictionary/personal-agent/. Accessed 4 Oct. 2026.