AES (Advanced Encryption Standard) is a symmetric block cipher algorithm that was adopted as a replacement for the DES (Data Encryption Standard) algorithm. AES is considered more secure than DES due to using a larger key size and being more computationally difficult to break. While AES is fast and reliable for encrypting files and documents, it is not suitable for encrypting communications due to the key exchange problem - for that, an asymmetric algorithm like RSA is typically used to securely exchange the AES key.