How To Build AI Agents That Make Money: The Ultimate Guide

AI agents are not the future. They're already here. So today I'm breaking down the ultimate beginner's guide to building AI agents. We're going to talk about what they are, where they're going, how you can build them yourself, and leading platforms that have AI agents available for you to use today. And so by the end of this video, you'll know exactly how to start leveraging AI agents to save you time and ultimately make more money. So let's get started. All right, so let's start with the basics. What is an AI agent and why should you care? AI agents, you want to look at these as workers that are available for you to do tasks that maybe you don't want to do or don't want to focus on because you want to focus on higher leverage activities. And so an example of a higher leverage activity might be if you're running a business, you might be thinking about mergers and acquisitions, you might be thinking about who you might want to hire, you might be thinking about product strategy. Those are high leverage activities. Now, things that you might want to offload to an agent, for example, might be, let's say, writing an article for SEO or scheduling for social media or responding to comments. Those are all things that frankly no human being wants to do. Now, to get started, there a few platforms that you can use to build your own agents and others that have already built AI agents that you can go in and use. If you want the path of least resistance when it comes to building these agents, there are already tools with prebuilt specialized agents. Replit is a code editor that allows you to prompt whatever you want to create. So you can say, I want to create a brand new website that looks like this one over here. Replit actually even helps you deploy an app. And so when you're creating a product or you're trying to create an app, usually it's going to require you to figure out, okay, what are you going to do about hosting? What are you going to do about deploying? And all these things that are basically frankly handled by developers. And if you're non-technical like myself, Replit actually helps you get there. So you can use Replit. And Cursor would be another product that you can use. It's actually more used by developers. And so we have engineers on our team that use Cursor and they report that they're 5 times faster with the work that they do because it helps them create more code and it helps them edit any code issues that they might have. The next one would be Delphi.ai, which is a chatbot that is trained on all of the content that I've ever created. I have a lot of content from over 3,000 episodes of Marketing School. There's my YouTube channel, there's my agency blog as well. And so this is a bot that's basically a B+ version of myself. And so it'll pull from the latest content that I've created, and it's basically an assistant for me that's available 24/7. And so this to me, this is the very beginning of this done with you where you're kind of going back and forth with it. I think this is a really great place to start if you want to get your feet wet with agents. Now let's talk about building your own agents from scratch. There's a thin line between automation and agents, and we're seeing that line blur very quickly. So Zapier is a well-known automation company. They've been around so long that they're doing hundreds of millions of revenue already. And this is way before AI became popular. So what Zapier allows you to do is Zapier allows you to create these different workflows. If you have a lead come into your website, it might push from your website to your Slack, it might push to your CRM like HubSpot, it might push to your Google Sheets. And so what I'm saying here is a lot of the work that you do is often just a step-by-step SOP. It's a standard operating procedure. And so Zapier is great for that. Zapier has been moving more and more into AI. You can actually go into Zapier and say whatever you want to automate. There's actually a chat box for you to enter in and then just talk about whatever it is that you want to build and it'll figure out what automations that should be combined. And then you can just test the automations to make sure that they work. Zapier has been invaluable for my business. I've used it for a very long time, probably over 10+ years now. But there are other, I would say, agentic tools that are similar to this that are built with AI first in mind. And so Lindy.ai is one that I've been using recently. What it does is if I'm going to go into a meeting, it'll actually tell me who all the participants are, what the company is, any recent conversations that we might have had. And so it'll give me intel basically 10 minutes before and I can actually have that set up and then I can edit the workflows and maybe I want to enhance Even with Zapier, it connects with MCP, which is Model Context Protocols. And so what that allows you to do, you can have the AI talk with your Google Drive, for example, or your Google Calendar. Let me give you an example here. If I want to use Claude, actually Claude has this available right now. I can ask it to do a visual breakdown of how I've been spending my time in the last 30 days or so, and it'll look at my Google Calendar. And basically these LLMs are now able to talk to these different apps, and then you could get a response that way and you're able to move a lot faster. So obviously, You can build your own agents, but there are platforms that are already edging towards full autonomy. Manus and GenSpark are 2 tools that feel like you're getting a true digital employee. Let me give you an example. So manus.im, I believe if you go to that website, what that allows me to do in one prompt, I basically asked it, I said, look, I want you to find me high-intent long-tail keywords that convert. And what I mean by that, let me just break it down. So for example, for my type of business, a keyword that might convert would be LinkedIn personalization account-based marketing software, right? It's a mouthful. These are all very long tail keywords that are high intent. Anyway, my point of telling you this is that Manus will help me find the relevant keywords. Then it will scan my blog to figure out what my blogger guidelines are. It will figure out the right keywords that I should be going for that aren't high competition. And then what will happen is it will create blog posts based on my writer guidelines, based on the keywords that it came up with that I had accepted. And so with one paragraph, it did the 21 blog posts in 30 minutes. Now you might be saying, oh, well, Eric, the content must be low quality if it did it in 30 minutes. No, the content was actually very high quality. And sure, we still want humans in the loop to check things, but it was basically 90-95% there. If I think back to my cost before, so if I did 21 blog posts, I used to pay $400 to $800 per blog post. Look at all the cost savings that I'm getting there. If I think about that, okay, I'm saving $8,000, $10,000, $12,000. Not only that, but I no longer have to wait for 21 blog posts. I don't have to wait a month or 2 months to get that done. It happened in 30 minutes. That means my costs have come down 80, 90% or so. And the time to getting this done, 99%. That is crazy. Now, GenSpark would be another product that you can use. And GenSpark actually allows you to make a super agent. I'm actually traveling. I'm hosting a conference next week in Miami. And I actually had it book a reservation for me. It called someone and it showed me the transcript. It made a reservation at this restaurant for me. I'm just telling you right now, this is the worst this stuff will ever be. It's only going to get better. So any of you that are like, oh, well, it's not so good right now. Right now, for what it is right now, it's amazing. And I'm telling you, whether you want to approach it from a DIY, DWI, DFY standpoint, we are almost there with fully autonomous agents. At the end of the day, the question is, how much time are you really saving by building agents yourself or using one of these tools? As I alluded to a little earlier, 99% time savings, 80 to 90% cost savings. What can you do with that time saved? What can you do with that money saved? You can go hire more amazing people. You can move your product roadmap faster and you can also pass a lot of these savings over to your customers. What that ultimately means is benefits not only to you, but to your customers, to the entire world. It's just going to make life a lot easier. If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Carrot, it allows you to create personalized ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. You're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to carrot.io. Again, it's karrot.ai, and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's karrot.ai, and we'll see you on the other side. This is the current state of AI agents, but it's changing fast. Imagine pressing a button and hundreds of agents run your workflow while a human just reviews the results. It's coming a lot sooner than we think, so it's important to keep yourself updated on the current state of AI agents to make sure that you don't fall behind. I'll give you another example. One person on my team, she said, well, I don't want to be someone that's managing a bunch of these robots, 1,000 robots, 10,000 robots. I said, look, That's not the way you want to look at this. Think about all the things that you hate doing at work. Make a list of all the things that you hate doing, every single thing that you hate doing. Now imagine if it's robots taking on all of those things that you don't want to do and all you're focusing on is strategy. And when I told her that, it was like a light bulb moment for her and everyone liked the idea for that. So if you're a leader in your company, it's your job to tell people to paint this vision of the future and say, look, AI is not here to replace us. It's here to make our lives easier. All right. So if you're ready to take your AI game further, check out this video next on AI tools I use every day to grow my business.