What is an AI Agent

Recent developments and advancements in AI have created a new interest for AI Agents. I shared my definition of them and how they can be beneficial for businesses.

What are AI Agents

An AI agent is a chatbot that can execute tasks to help you reach a goal.

Another important characteristic of agents is that they are autonomous.

Most chatbots nowdays are powered by Conversational AI technologies, and usually a Large Language Model or LLM, for short.

The difference with a normal AI chatbot is that AI agents can understand and process more complex requests by executing certain actions autonomously.

These are some examples of these actions:

• Generate an invoice link and send it to the customer
• Book a discovery meeting and notify the relevant team on Slack
• Estimate a quote for a project and send it over email
• Save the email address of a website visitor to a CRM

An example of agents are the GPTs, the custom versions of ChatGPT available in OpenAI's GPT Store, that can have built-in “roles” and can execute certain tasks.

The major downside of GPTs, is that they can't be integrated in your website. They live inside the ChatGPT interface and can be accessed by your customers only if you make your GPT public and your customers have a ChatGPT Plus subscription.

Another name used to describe Agents is Assistants, but they refer to the same concept in most cases.

In short, AI Agents are the next-generation of AI chatbots that have complex reasoning capabilities and the means to execute tasks.

What are the benefits of AI Agents

Here are the main benefits of AI Agents:

They learn once

You can teach your agent something, and they don't need to learn the same thing again later, even if they don't use that knowledge ever.

We humans, learn something and normally, if we don't apply what we learned, we will lose that knowledge. We will forget it.

This is key to businesses, because every time you have a new employee, let's say a receptionist, you need to train them.

They will need to go through a training phase. It's inevitable.

The person might very skilled and knowledgeable in their are of expertise, but they will still need to learn about the company, its processes, policies, products or services, the target audience, business values, etc.

An AI Agent learn once and retain the information forever.

They learn fast

The humans' learning cycle is slow. It doesn't matter if you're a genius or an average Joe, you need to put time and effort to learn most things.

And I mean learn it really well, understanding all there is to it about the topic you're learning.

It might take you weeks, months, or years depending on the topic, but it takes time no matter what.

The rate at which an AI Agent learn is much faster, in the order of seconds to just hours.

AI Agents learn faster than humans. Is the truth.

They are available 24/7

AI Agents are not biological beens, therefore they don't need to rest, eat, sleep, take a walk, or go to the bathroom.

This is clearly not the case for humans. But, the difference is that humans have more things to do that just work.

An AI Agent instead is created specifically with a purpose in mind. Is there to help the humans handle business tasks that would require a human.

This is an advantage because you can have an agent doing and taking care of the parts of the business that we don't enjoy as much as other things.

AI Agents are available 24/7 handling the boring tasks of our businesses.

They are less expensive

Running an AI Agent can be a very cost-effective solution for many businesses that don't have the resources to hire people.

I would encourage you that once your business grows, consider hiring professionals, they will have a higher impact, but until you reach that phase, an AI agent can give you a hand meanwhile.

Why you should consider creating an AI agent for your business

AI has become more accessible than ever before. AI Agents are revolutionizing businesses of all sizes across all industries.

According to a Capgemini report, the satisfaction level of consumers using chatbots is highest among generative AI use cases at 89%.

In another report from Google Cloud, 73% of entreprise leaders see customer service and chatbots their number 1 priority of Generative AI use cases for 2024.

By now, all experts agree that AI won’t replace jobs, at least not entirely for a while more, but what it will do is enable workers who leverage AI replace other workers who don’t. The same will happen for companies. Businesses that embrace AI will take over businesses that don’t.

We believe Conversational AI is a key component to offer excellent customer experiences and to save time to busy business owners.

One simple way to supercharge your business is with an AI Agent. Whether it's in customer service, lead generation, or sales automation, a Conversational AI solution has the potential to transform how your business operate and deliver more value to your customers.

AI Agents are now, a cost-effective solution to handle many customer interactions that companies are still handling manually, wasting valuable time and energy.

Why we are building agents with Voiceflow

Among the many tools and services available today to build and launch AI solutions, we believe Voiceflow is the best-in-class platform to build AI Agents that have a meaningful impact for businesses.

Voiceflow offers a unique balance for creating highly customized but extremely powerful agents. It also features outstanding customer support and a growing community of Conversational AI enthusiasts, like assistant designers, agent developers, and tool builders, so you're are never alone when facing issues.

In addition, Voiceflow agents can be integrated to any exisiting tool or system that businesses are already using (as long as they have a public API).

By choosing Voiceflow as the platform we use to build agents for our clients, we specialize in one tool that is having an outstanding adoption among companies and other AI agencies.

Summary

AI Agents are the future. The implications are too big to ignore this major AI trend.

With AI Agents, businesses can provide a top-notch experience to customers, employees, and partners.

If you are interested in having an AI agent for your business, book a call here, and let's get started!