01Capabilities side by side
Chatbots are conversational: they answer FAQs, summarise documents and draft text. Agents add tool use and memory of a task: they can pull last week's orders, compare them with stock levels and prepare a reorder list.
The difference matters most when the output has to land somewhere—a CRM record, a product catalogue, a sent email. That is where an agent saves real hours.
02Risk and control
Because agents act, they need guardrails. The simplest effective guardrail is human approval before anything leaves the building. Switch's approach is that a person approves every output in the thread where the work was requested.
03Which one do you need?
If your problem is answering questions, start with a chatbot or a general-purpose assistant. If your problem is a recurring workflow that eats hours across several tools, you need an agent.