An AI customer support agent is a large-language-model-powered system that reads a customer's message, determines what they actually need, retrieves the correct authorized information from your knowledge base and backend systems, and either resolves the issue directly — issuing a refund, updating an order, changing a subscription — or hands it to a human agent with full context when it hits the edge of its authority. It is built to act, not just to chat, which is what separates it from a scripted chatbot or a keyword-matching FAQ bot.