🦸🏻#6: The Role of Profiling in Agentic Workflows

Intro

In the dynamic world of AI agents, profiling, knowledge, and memory are tightly intertwined, shaping how these systems perceive, adapt, and respond to their environments and tasks. Profiling – rarely given its own category in agent design – is the bridge between an agent's static capabilities and its dynamic adaptability, based on programmed knowledge and more adaptive memory systems. It is the mechanism that enables intelligent agents to create detailed "portraits" of the environments, users, and tasks they engage with. By synthesizing what the agent "knows" (pre-existing knowledge) and what it "remembers" (historical and real-time data), profiling drives nuanced decision-making, personalized interactions, and seamless task execution. And then you throw in reasoning and planning, reflection, action, and communication – voilà – the whole agentic workflow is complete.

In this episode, we’ll dive into recent and older research papers that offer fascinating perspectives on the concept of an “agent profile.” Profiling deserves to be discussed as a distinct and critical core component of agentic workflows because it acts as the crucial layer connecting humans and machines in their communication. We’ll highlight some long-forgotten studies and explore how they inform contemporary approaches. Ready? Let’s go.

What’s in today’s episode?

• Profiling: understanding the world around and how to behave

  • 1. Who am I? Agent Avatar

  • 2. What do I do? Agent Behavior (BDI model)

  • 3. Where am I? Agent Environment

  • 4. How good am I? Agent performance

  • 5. How far can I go? Agent resources

• Profiling: the foundation for intelligent behavior

• Concluding thoughts

• Resources that were used to write this article (we put all the links in that section)

_{We apologize for the anthropomorphizing terms scattered throughout this article – let’s agree they are all in ““. (In the Resources section, we provide a paper on anthropomorphizing that is a must-read for designing dialogue systems.)}

Profiling: understanding the world around and how to behave

Profiling is not a very common term, but we’d like to stick to it since it perfectly encapsulates everything that agents need to do to be aware of their environment and their role in it. Profiling is the process of observing, analyzing, and interpreting the contexts in which agents operate. This isn’t limited to identifying the physical or digital environment – profiling encompasses evaluating performance metrics and understanding behavioral patterns, creating a multi-dimensional awareness that allows agents to act intelligently. In a nutshell, profiling is all about awareness. And how do we unpack this awareness? By asking all the right questions →

1. Who am I? Agent Avatar