The TRUTH About AI Agents No One Wants to Tell You

I'm seeing an incredible amount of filth online at the moment about AI. Everything I'm digesting across social media and YouTube is telling me that I should be focusing on the wrong things. I'm seeing a lot of people talk about this and it's pushing people like yourself. My number one job today is to educate people like you who are in the AI arena or have businesses who are looking to implement AI into their business where to focus their time and energy. Because honestly, no matter what they tell you, those 72 AI agents grouped together in NAN can't birth children, right? They can't, they can't be deployed to handle end to end business systems. It doesn't exist. In essence, they're piecing together all of that group to make it valuable, right? But the breakages, the complexity, the depths, the levels of lack of segmentation in that, in that approach is going to cripple you. I've made millions in the AI space. I am a top 1% global freelancer on Upwork. If I am getting overwhelmed and confused by what I'm seeing, then I can only imagine what you guys feel like. So if you stick with me for the next 10, 15 minutes, I'm going to showcase to you exactly where you should focus your efforts. Why the AI agents in particular, which is the one that's really irked me, it's just digital filth and has been put out there and it's misleading people like yourselves. And it's my job, I feel like my job to stay step in and to explain where you should stay on track and you should actually make sure that you're focused on what you can sell to businesses. You will have seen a copious amount of individual flows, templates, etc that you can download, that you can implement that all come from AI agents. But the truth is, is that AI agents alone on their self and grouped together is where the problem starts. But the AI agent model is cool, is Q, is usable. But when you start to put all of them together and group them into the whole system, instead of having individual flows or sub workflows, etc. To run the business, you get stuck in a position where things are going to become very, very complex very, very, very quickly. Okay? And I don't want anybody watching my content to fall into that trap when all you're trying to do is sell AI to businesses. 10% of AI can be sold to businesses. The other 90% is just garbage. By garbage I don't mean you can't have fun with it. Please have fun with AI. Because you should. I do, I play around with AI all the time just to see what its limitations are, what you can make it do. But the fact is, is that you need to make money and in order to make money, you need to sell to businesses. So today this is a practical guide for business owners, freelancers, consultants, marketing professionals who want to cut through the AI noise, which is the loudest it's ever been right now, and build real value. And the way that we're going to do that is by looking at the complexity trap as the first stage. Okay, so these outlandish claims that these AI agents are taking over and that you are in a position now where you can actually just build out a whole deployment of AI solutions for a business using AI agents is wrong. You're promised that AI agent swarms, they'll replace entire teams. They won't, they will break. Okay, novice creators or inexperienced, let's say an inexperienced, I don't want to say novice, inexperienced creatives or inexperienced marketing consultants or businesses. When it comes to the AI golden egg, what happens to them is that they, they look at the individual flow, they look at the individual task and they try to make it as complex as physically possible. Think they have to have all of these abundance of steps to make it bulletproof. Well, actually every single time you add an additional step, you make it more fragile and vulnerable. And that is exactly why the AI agents have got me irked. Because AI agents do exactly that. AI agents become this massive tangled up knot that you are then stuck with. And when it comes to an issue which you will 1000% have of that approach, you have, you know, one broken link, one missing parameter, the whole thing falls on its head and it leaves you in a position where it's very, very difficult to debug. It leaves you in a position where the client's on at you. My onboarding system, with everything that you've told me that you've promised together looks great in demo, but actually in reality it hasn't performed well. You know, don't be sold on the complexity. The truth is, complexity is a bug, not a feature. Complexity is a bug, not a feature. It's something that will cause you to have more problems further down the road than what it will do. If you look at a project and look at the simplest way to achieve that with the best possible output, that is how you should be looking at AI. Now. The golden rule of real value, when AI comes into, into this arena, when AI entered the space of business, the golden rule of it is to for you is to forget all of the shiny objects and stuff, check out new tools. Things change every day. You need to be at the forefront of that to make sure that you, you stay, you know well within your your boots of a, of an experienced or as you go along your journey, become an experienced AI automation consultant or agency or or even a business that's implementing this. You need to know what's available on the market. But real business value comes from only two things and two things alone. Increase in revenue or increase in savings and profit. Now those are top end and bottom end. Every system you build should serve one of those two goals and it should serve it with concrete capability. No AI on the planet is 100% bulletproof. I hear that, I understand. But the difference between a massively hugely complex flow involving multiple AI agents, sub workflows etc or research, documentation or tools that are incorrect. The, the difference in the chart which shows you the hit rate of how consistent you are very system very similar to my video on system prompting and engineering. It's going to be off the mark and that means that you are then focusing on things which are not in part of the golden rule. And I can't explain to you how much businesses focus on these two things. When you have a sales call with a client or as a business sat here watching this now, right? Let's, let's say you're a business owner, you own a business and you're sat watching this video, there's two things you care about. You care about increasing your savings and ultimately gaining profit. So whether that's efficiency from team members, whether that's time spent doing tasks yourself, whether that's repetitive tasks that are plaguing the business, maybe that is, I don't know, operational efficiency in terms of the way that your HR funnel is managed. Whatever it is, that is a critical issue for you and is something that you would like somebody to solve for you. And that's how you should look at it. When you speak to businesses, the top end is increasing revenue speed to lead inquiries, sms, email, marketing automation, extracting information, generating more leads, ensuring that leads are managed more efficiently once they do come through the door, none are missed. There are reminders set, there are triggers sent when things happen. Increasing customer lifetime value by implementing churn detection techniques into businesses is a big thing I sell. And the difference and the reason why these things are so important is because when you look at this right from a perspective of a business's point of view, let's use green. When you look at this from A business point of view. This 10% here, which is, this is the, the, the, the revenue, this is the, this is the profit. This is where you want to focus your time and efforts. Okay, this 10, well, the 90% that falls into this of shiny AI objects that look really cool and can do really cool things and maybe they can generate really cool images, which is something that I, I actually released yesterday or the couple of days ago about creating AI images. Yes, they're amazing, but they have to be implemented into a system. So if, if you were using that though, like if you, for example, if you were using image in 4 to produce images that went into a presentation deck that somebody in a sales team could use, excellent use case of using AI imagery. If you're sat in your bedroom creating a Fortnite character skin using imaging, probably not going to be saleable to a business. And this is exactly where you're falling into that trap when it comes to complexity. The only difference is you can't see it. It doesn't make sense. Like I've just explained it to you there, it actually falls into a category of you think that it's right, but it isn't 90 of the stuff that you're seeing. AI agents. And I do, I do want to just repeat that. I'm not saying you can never use AI agents at all. I'm not saying that. But AI agents relying on it to handle the whole funnel is an issue. Okay, this 10 of AI here that you, that increases profit. This 10 that increases profit. This is where your, your focus needs to be. This 90 of AI over here, which is just a flat line and is a waste of time. Okay, is a waste of time. That is going to be where you're going to be having conversations with businesses or spending your own time trying to learn AI and actually leave yourself in a position where you're learning skills which aren't applicable for saleable assets. Our key, my job today is to get you to focus on this 10%. That's it. That's all I'm trying to do. And because I'm hearing so much noise, it's making me feel like I need to do this. So if we go back to this and follow the golden rules, there's two golden rules that you need to follow. You need to increase revenue and that tends to be at the top end, which is getting more leads, converting leads faster, increasing customer lifetime value. I gave you the playbook there. Like I gave you the playbook lead nurturing, sms, email, how they, how the new inquiries experience Is once they come through their workflow, how the team pick up their inquiries. You know, things like something I created for a business recently, creating a generate AI summary button inside of HubSpot that gave them an up to date real time summary so that if other members of the team were speaking to a client and they'd had calls and stuff like that, and then like, I don't know, a client relationship manager want needed to go in there and see exactly where they were at that time, they would hit this button. But depending on the information it would also have a separate score. And that score, if it hit a certain number, either low or high, high for an upsell, low for churn, potential churn, it would be pinged off to the client retention manager and they would pick it up from there and deal with it, book a call with the client and ensure that they're using their SaaS properly. So these are all areas that you can focus on when it comes to that, when it comes down to increasing savings and profit. And the reason why I think this is such a big deal is because I think these are easier flows to build for beginners. I feel like reducing manual hours of manual import is something that you can pick up really, really, really quickly. Like you can pick up within, you know, a month of education, probably a lot less. It depends on what your background is like literally within a week like I could build different flows that did different things because I was already in the digital arena. If it doesn't, if it takes you longer, it's okay, don't feel under pressure. Well, but all I'm saying is reducing this bottom end of increasing savings and profit by reducing manual hours, automating repetitive tasks and improving operational efficiency tend to be easier than if you were to build a two way, just this is just an example, a two way SMS system for a business. Because there's going to be a lot of back and forward when it comes to what you can say, what you can't say. I tend to avoid those sorts of industries where that becomes important. If I was going to start my AI journey again now, today, I would ensure that I only focused on large ticket, highly profitable businesses. I wouldn't focus, focus your efforts on looking at, you know, I don't know, legal, finance based businesses, accountants, anything where there's potential for liability on their part that causes massive friction when it comes to the use of AI because it can't make statements, conveyances, anything to do with solicitors and lawyers, those sorts of things. Avoid those, stick to the cream, which Is like the SaaS businesses or the high ticket lead generation industries, those are the areas that you should target. But if I was to pick one that was easier, I would say it's the manual data entry is a really good entry point for you, pun intended is a really good entry point for you. But either of those, as long as you're focusing on those, that's it. An AI agent that can go out there and research the weather for you is not going to generate you any money. From a business perspective, I highly doubt if anybody proves me wrong, just comment below and I'll apologize. But I don't see how AI agents all been grouped together like that is going to work. The thing is that surprises me and should surprise you is that it's actually incredibly simple. The business blueprint that you need, if, if. Well, once you're competent enough to be able to deploy this or sell, learn, earn and learn is a big thing. When you look at this, most services businesses run on a handful of core processes. You can literally look at one and what you build for one will stick and stay and be usable for somebody else. I have a thing in my arena where I focus on tech stacks. That's my niche. So like people say niche down into this and then they'll go into this area and it's SaaS or they'll go to this area and it's whatever. I focus on tech stacks. So my tech stack that I actually have is like well if I build a massive flow out for Fresh desk or and I build a massive flow out for Zoho and I build a massive flow out for, I don't know, HubSpot, right? I build out these flows for churn risk detection. All of a sudden every single business that's available that uses that tool that I can apply that to, it will be different. There will be different messaging, it will be different structures. Things will need to change. Of course nothing is going to stay exactly the same. But it gives you that sort of 80, 20 rule where you did all the hard work the first time you did it. When it comes back around to it, you take the 80% of it, what you've done, you change the 20% and that gives you the output that you need from a perspective of actually being able to deliver. The simplicity of this is so simple. Focus on these five areas. Lead generation, speed to lead systems, automated scraping of qualified leads, personalized outreach, apify, Apollo, you know, closed bot, SMS systems inside of Nan Twilio. Anything that you need to get to get rolling. Email is obviously a simple one. WhatsApp, Telegram, all of these individual things. LinkedIn outreach. There's so many different opportunities that you can focus on here. Big green light for that one. In fact, I'm going to change the color. Big green light for lead generation. Okay. Solving lead generation issues for businesses. It pays. Pays the bills. Now, sales. Sales is a big thing. What you often find is that instead of a sales rep actually focusing on picking up the phone or taking their meetings and taking their calls, they're very inefficient. They're operating at like 50 rates, 40 rates. Because they have to do things like they have to go and log their meeting that they just had into HubSpot. Well, incorporate a tracking tool, granola fireflies into their meetings and have that automatically passed over to that HubSpot deal so they don't have to go and do the data entry. It falls a bit under data entry as well. But automating proposals, when they've spoken to a client, literally, if they could just have a NAN form that they filled in and said what it was and it went off and generated the Panda dot, fired it out there, had the invoice attached to it. You can, obviously there is a feature in Panda Dot, you can have the payment at the end of it, but if they didn't use that and they wanted to use something else and you fire the invoice off all of these things, once signed, you can do all of these automations, scheduling and payment processing. Money makers, real money makers for businesses. Businesses want to get paid, they want to make more sales. That's just a fact. Client onboarding. Client onboarding is one that when you sell it, you have to make sure that you sell it properly. Because some businesses don't think that they have a problem with their client onboarding. But what you'll find is that every single individual person that comes through their door, right? Every single individual person that comes through their door has a different experience to what another one had. Some of them, you know, go extremely well. This can. This mass. This varies massively as well, depending on if how much human input is done during the onboarding. If human input is done during the onboarding, this is a major problem for businesses and they waste a lot of time on it. Found some gold in there when that happens. Service fulfillment. So AI assistant, content generation, asset design, like I just mentioned to you a moment ago, if the presentation decks, pitch decks, whatever reports, things like that, you can, you can use tools to do it. Data analysis, you could use them. You could use something like bolt to build them something that their customers could actually log into, like you could. There's. It's crazy, so many different things you could do. But service fulfillment is a big one. Anything that can help them deliver a better service, they're going to pay you for. And finally I've had to escape on that because I covered it up. But reactivation, Reactivation, okay, is slept on so much that I can't explain it to you, right? There's too many Z's when it comes around to reactivation because everybody focuses on these four and there's nothing wrong with that. These four different areas here are all critical to businesses. But reactivation is a such a huge thing because businesses have data, okay? They have data and inside of this data they have people. And those people at one stage were actively looking for that company, so they were looking for that business. Now, depending on the company you're working with and the service they offer, for example, if it's a conveyancer, the chances of you being able to reactivate are quite low. If you work with an E commerce company and you sell mattresses, it's quite low because mattresses are changed like, you know, over a prolonged period of time. But if you have something that's like a perishable product, for example, or a repeat service, for example, things like that, like in the AI space, this would be a good example. In the AI space, this would be perfect. You use the reactivation to reactivate these people using SMS, email, anything, LinkedIn, anything you can do, you know, data enrichment from reactivation to find them and reach out to them in a new way, pitch them on an offer. This is slept on a lot because businesses, like, if they're large businesses you're dealing with, they will have a stupendous list of individual businesses and inquiries that they've received historically that they're currently doing absolutely nothing with. And that is gonna be somewhere where there, there is gold difficult to convert. But my average response rate from SMS in, in the UK is 22 for reactivation. You think about that. Business has got 100,000 leads sat in its catalog. Well, 22,000 of them will reactivate and respond to you with the SMS approach that I take. I don't even know why I said uk because I have US clients as well that beat that. And unless it depends, you know, the United States of America is no different when it comes to sms. The setting up of SMS usage and things like in the UK and Europe, WhatsApp is a big thing. So WhatsApp is a big thing you should be leveraging in the US it's not so much but telegram is bigger I believe. Don't say that statement as gospel, but things there's the differences in the in in markets that you have to keep in mind. And that's just a bit of a golden nugget for me from experience of going through this automate what matters. Lead generation inbound speed to lead systems outbound automated lead scraping, outreach personalized cold emails or DMS client onboarding welcome sequences triggered emails after payment resource delivery automatic access to potential materials service fulfillment Automatic follow ups 30 days after completion. Use AI to generate the first drafts or analyze data etc help the team out doing all of these things. I think I have explained this in the previous page, but seriously, a simple two, two to six or eight step flow could do what 15 AI, AI AI agents do. Easy for me to say AI agents do. And you don't have the issues of the complexity of breakages. And that's exactly where we're trying to focus. The creator's dilemma is understanding incentives. So this is where you fall in to this category. You are in a position now where you're, you're going to be, you're going to be falling foul to this whether you understand it or not. I guarantee it because I am as well like I've. But I've seen it like I spotted it because I've have experience in the game. I've got skin in the game. So I know. But when it comes down to the complexity, everyone's pushing complexity on you and it's going to make you start falling into a category of where you need to make your flows more complex. You don't, you know, the knowledge gap. Creators are incentivized to make their work seem increasingly, increasingly complex. It's something that is natural. The bigger the perceived gap between their knowledge and yours is how you see them as an authority, right? I'm not saying they're wrong for that. It's exactly what I'm doing here. I'm trying to share education, right. I have a short that I made not long ago and it was like I don't care if you made 50 million, 100 million. There's things that I can teach you, believe me. And it doesn't matter whether I made 50 million, 100 million. There's things that you can teach me and that's why I'm big on the network and collaboration element. But don't fall into the knowledge gap trap of when you're looking at these AI agents and stuff the real secret is this stuff is not that complicated. AI is not that complicated. Fulfillment for businesses is not that complicated. When it comes down to what AI actually is, all we need to do is look at the businesses bottlenecks. Where are your problems, sir? These are the issues. Okay, well I can do X, Y and Z. And that will speed up your funnel and will allow you to be more agile and more fast, faster to market, faster to process more streamlined aerodynamic business that you've got yourself there. And all you've got to do is pay me this, this set of fee and this retainer, okay? It's not, it's not in the, in. When it comes to AI, the devil is not in the detail, right? The detail is the problem. Like it really is. Like when it comes down to AI, that is, that is the case. Your new playbook for automation. From here on, I want it to be this, I want you to stop watching the news, right? I want you to stop watching the information. Stop looking at the, the rate of new AI models, the, the AI agents, the this, that, that this new system is better than all of this. Chasing the smartest model ever, jumping on every new individual platform, watching endless development updates around individual things, reading through Reddit, going through all of these things. Stop that. Start focusing on what truly matters. Favor simplicity. Aim for two to six steps. Obviously there'll be many that are significantly longer than that. I could show you some of my flows that have got like 100 nodes in them, but there's causation for that. It's not because I made it complex by design. It isn't, it was just necessary for that one individual element. The majority of my flows, they can have sub workflows in them, but the majority of my flows, you know, they are, they, they are between like let's say 10 and under, 10 and under nodes. Long HTTP request here, process data here, set data there, send data here, extract this update there. Done. Like that's the sort of the sales pattern and process. Focus on fundamentals. Target the 5, 5 core business, business processes that I mentioned. Understand incentives. Be wary of those who sell complexity because it's not true. You don't need to build complex information and going to the contrary of this. I watch a lot of, of YouTube content from creators. I have a lot of respect for individuals, especially somebody like Nick Sarayev. I have huge respect for them and what they produce, right? And when you look at those people, you, you will learn and you will educate. But build, don't watch. So once you've watched and digested information. Don't just go on a cycle of continuing to bit to watch and watch and watch and watch and get paralysis analysis going and build. Take that information, follow one of my live builds, look at one of my live builds. Go and take it. See some of them are flows with them. So contrary to what I'm saying to you here, I do that. But anything that I've got that has a flow attached to it is because it's saleable to a business, right? It's because you can use it. If we're playing around with AI, I tell you right at the start. So build, don't watch, apply proven tools, solve real problems. Let's build what matters. That is ultimately what what is the key. If after this video you still go and digest information around all of these crazy new AI agents and stuff like that and think that that's going to solve your problem, I guarantee you if you just sat down for two days and focused on picking a tech stack, I don't know, say HubSpot, Gmail, Panda, Doc and Stripe and built out flows like that, or maybe pick fresh desk and build out a flow for churn handling or ticket entry, Arjun or whatever it might be and just sat and built it. I guarantee you you would have a saleable asset that is better and more concrete than what the majority of the other individual providers are creating at this moment in time. My name is Michael Elliott. I hope this video helps you keep on track because honestly, there is so much going on in the space at the moment that is causing issues like subscribe. I'll catch you on the next one. If you need any information with your own business and need support, book a meeting with me below and I'll catch you next time.