How I Wish Someone Explained AI Agents To Me (as a beginner)

So AI agents, there's so much information out there, it can be overwhelming trying to learn about them. So I wanted to come in here and break it down simply, just the way that I wish someone would have explained it to me when I first started learning about them. I'm pretty new to this space too, and I've definitely felt confused when trying to learn about some of this stuff. So hopefully you guys find this informative, and by the end you'll have a good idea of what these agents are capable of and how you can start building them to make your life easier and ultimately make a ton of money off them. I also plan to make videos about this topic specifically tailored towards people new to the space. So if it sounds like you and you want to dive into the AI agent space or AI automations in general, definitely check out some videos in the future. But yeah, let's just hop right into this one. So I wanted to start off by touching on the golden opportunity that I see and that a lot of people are starting to see in, um, the AI agent space. So I was definitely a little skeptical. About the hype and you're completely sane to be skeptical. But check this out. So there's a search interest in AI agents over the past year. As you can see, it's skyrocketed. Right now is definitely the best time to get in while sort of like ride the wave, you know, as they say, while everything's new, because inevitably everyone will be in the space and everyone will be making money off of this. So Now is the golden opportunity to learn and just sort of dive in. That's what I'm trying to do, at least. All right, so first things first, what exactly are AI agents? Simply put, um, an AI agent is like having an employee who has perfect memory, follows exact instructions, doesn't sleep, and costs a fraction of hiring an actual human being. They're powered by advanced AI models, so they basically have a brain, and their brain has perfect memory because it's going to pull the information that you're giving it, whether that's, you know, information about your company, information about their client profile, whatever it may be. They'll be able to recall it perfectly, which is so much better than the way you or I can recall information that we read in the past. They're always going to follow your exact, exact instructions. So whatever you prompt them to do is exactly what they're going to do. A lot of humans can sort of stray away from that kind of stuff. So that's huge too. They're never gonna sleep, so they're gonna be working 24/7, even if it's something as simple as customer support. And your clients won't have to wait, you know, leave you a voicemail, wait for you to respond to their emails, that kind of stuff. They're gonna get feedback right away, or they're gonna get the answers they need right away, which is just huge for, you know, boosting relationship and getting all the value out of the customer that you're trying to get. And then also, like, all of that those are all just positive things. Those are all pluses. And it's just going to cost a fraction of hiring an actual human. So, um, yeah, it sounds too good to be true almost. Um, I've also seen agents that are able to call up clients, potential clients, um, try to upsell them, try to book calls, whatever it may be. And the client almost has no idea it's an agent because it just, it sounds so real and they're able to have like an actual conversation. And I've seen TikTok and Instagram accounts that are 100% ran by an agent. You know, they create the content, they push it out onto the social media, whatever it may be. And they, they can do all this kind of stuff just based on the tools that you give it and the way that you prompt your agent to act. So here's kind of what we did in the past, right? We would, let's say it was, we wanted an agent to send an email for us, or we wanted to send an email. We would read the email, we would put that into chat and have it read it for us and generate a response, copy and paste it over into Gmail, and then we'd send it off ourselves. So it's definitely nice, like a nice use of AI and ChatGPT. But, um, with agents, like all of that's removed pretty much. It'll do all of that automatically for you. So how exactly do AI agents work? So AI agents are powered by a large language model. That's sort of their brain. And that's just something like ChatGPT or Claude. And because they have a brain, they can make decisions, they can handle dynamic tasks, and they can adapt to new information in real time. And what makes them even more powerful is that they're not just limited to one action or task. You can give them multiple tools, access to your calendar, CRM, whatever it may be, and they'll be able to combine those with different logic in order to do the job that you want it to do. So here's just a quick visualization. On the left, we have an entity. This is a human. Human has a brain. They can reason. They can use logic to make decisions. And then you give the human access to tools like Excel, LinkedIn, Google, Word, Slack, Google Drive, whatever it may be. So just think about it as simple as that, right? The entity is just an AI agent with the ability to reason, use logic to make decisions, and access the tools that you give them in order to do exactly what it is that you're prompting them to do. So no need to overcomplicate it. Like I said, this is all it really is. Um, okay, so I wanted to touch on sort of the difference between traditional automations and AI automations. So here's just sort of like a flowchart logic, you may call it, of a process. So it starts You go through a couple things, and eventually you get to a point right here where you need to make a decision. And so this is where, you know, I work in automation, so when you're, when you're trying to automate processes, there's a lot of things where it's going to be like a yes or no, or it's going to be, is a number higher than 10 or lower than 10? A lot of stuff is going to be a clear, you know, black and white answer, and that's where automations break if it needs to be dynamic, or if there's any sort of reasoning that needs to go into it, any sort of thinking that needs to go into it, that's when they get tough to automate because you, you think, oh, I need a human to be able to think through this and make that decision. But with AI agents, they're going to be able to do that because they have the brain of a large language model. So we all know that ChatGPT's really good at writing a discussion post for you, maybe if you were taking a college class, or reading an article and then giving you a nice summary because they have the ability to think and use background information and adapt to sort of like what is being thrown at them. So just super, super cool stuff here. All right. So moving on to why you should care about agents and why you should care about this opportunity. So the first thing is efficiency and cost savings. Obviously agents are going to save you a ton of time and money. They're going to give you the same leverage as hiring employees but without the cost of salaries, benefits, or training, all that tedious stuff. Next, we've got scalability. They can scale super easily. If you need more agents, just make them, just build them. If your business is growing, you don't need to hire more employees that can— if the work can be done by agents. So they can handle the increasing workload without breaking a sweat. They're not rigid traditional automations. So they're not going to break when things change. The next point, it's a great segue into adaptability. They're able to, like I said, it's very dynamic. They can adjust their behavior based on new data, changing environments, unexpected scenarios. It all kind of relates back to the way you prompt an agent. I won't get too much into the prompting of an agent right now, but the more examples you give it, it sees like what is coming in and how to react. it'll be smarter and smarter. And as you sort of interact with it more, it'll, it'll get smarter and smarter. Next, we've got the ability to make decisions. We talked about this with traditional automation, but they can analyze data, they can reason, they can choose the best course of action, which is perfect for complex tasks that you couldn't achieve with traditional automation in the past. Fifth, we've got the ability to build them so easily. A lot of people probably think that you need to have majored in computer science and know how to code in Python, Java, all that kind of stuff, but you really don't. Nowadays there's so many low-code, no-code tools out there to be able to build agents. There's so many good tutorials on YouTube on how to build agents, whether it's Relevance AI, super intuitive, Make, Zapier, something like N8N is something that I've been using recently to build agents. Super, super easy to learn. And this is a great time to learn because, like I said earlier, inevitably everyone will be learning. So get ahead of the curve to the point where you can be able to teach people how to do it. And then sixth, last but not least, we've got the future. It's just a super, super exciting time to be in this space. These agents are constantly improving. In the future, businesses may no longer rely on large teams for everyday tasks. And I'm not saying that Humans will completely be removed out of the process. Like, I don't really think that's super realistic, but just like freeing up that time for humans to do higher impact work is definitely, definitely super important. And yeah, pretty much all of these reasons is like, do I even need a seventh? That's, that makes me want to build agents. I don't know about you guys, but so where can you use agents? I'm not really going to get too deep into this in this video because that could be like a 30-minute topic. There's so many places where I see these agents being able to be implemented, but we'll just cover sort of 4 main points right now. Um, 4 big areas of a business where agents can be utilized is, um, we've got marketing, we've got onboarding, customer success, and project management. That's just like the 4 that I'll briefly hit on today. So first one we said was marketing. Stuff like cold outreach, um, this has been able to be automated in the past but not as personalized as these can be because these agents can get background information on whoever it is that the email is going to and they can really personalize it to the, to the point where the prospect has no idea it was written by basically a robot. Scraping leads, qualifying leads, same thing with follow-ups, they can be personalized really well. And content creation, Like I said about those TikTok accounts that are completely run by AI, it's, it's insane. Next we've got onboarding. There are a lot of, you know, things in place when you bring on a new client that you have to do. A lot of documents, you gotta collect a lot of information. You wanna make them feel like part of a business. And a lot of this stuff can be automated with AI agents. You got customer success. This is just stuff like getting feedback from your, your, clients, making sure they're happy, making sure that they're not always leaving you voicemails. An agent can sort of handle that kind of stuff really well because it has all the knowledge that you're giving it as far as information about your company. So next we got project management. We've got stuff like agents can schedule meetings, they can upload documents, track performance, this kind of stuff. Even if it's just a very small part of a larger workflow, just being able to save 5 minutes a day here and there definitely add up, especially with, you know, small businesses. So yeah, that is pretty much all I've got. Hopefully that gave you guys all some high-level insight as to what agents are, what they can do. I also hope that this piqued your interest and made you sort of want to play around with building some and implementing them into your business or your life in some way. Um, like I said, I really think this is the way that all businesses, whether they're big or small, are going to start to move, um, to conduct some of their operations in the future. So this is absolutely the perfect time to start learning from, or learning about this kind of stuff. But yeah, like I said, I plan to continue making videos on this topic tailored towards beginners in this space, tutorials, more insights into how they can be used, how they work. So if you're interested in that kind of stuff, definitely check out some videos in the future. But that's all I've got for today. So thanks, guys.