General term for AI systems that autonomously conduct multi-step research — issuing search queries, reading results, synthesizing, and iterating without a human in the loop between steps. OpenAI's Deep Research, Perplexity's research mode, Anthropic's research agents, and Google's Gemini research all compete in this category. Relevant to SupportWire because the same pattern — agent reads docs, agent synthesizes, agent drafts reply — is what "autonomous support" actually looks like under the hood.