AI Agents Are Learning to Predict What Users Want-Before They Ask for It

Researchers at Shanghai Jiao Tong University and Chinese technology conglomerate Tencent claim to have built an AI agent that uses the quiet time between conversations to predict what users may ask next—and prepare answers before they ask. The system, called ProAct, works differently from most AI agents that wait for users to ask a question before responding. Instead, ProAct uses downtime between messages to review past conversations and saved user information, then prepares useful information in the background before the next question arrives. “While AI agents demonstrate remarkable capabilities in reasoning and tool use, they remain fundamentally reactive: They compute…