S1. Ep 4 Exploring AI Agents for Business Owners

Katie: Welcome to the AI Automations for Business Podcasts. We're your hosts, Katie and Noel, and we'll be discussing how you can use AI for your business along with the latest news, updates and automations to help you stay ahead of the curve, allowing you to grow and scale your business more efficiently. Please be sure to subscribe and I hope you enjoy this episode. Welcome back to another episode and Noel, what are we talking about today?

Noel: And we're going to talk about AI agents today, which is a real hot topic at the moment. Amazing. Okay.

Katie: So let's just start at the very beginning. What is an AI agent?

Noel: So an AI agent is an AI tool that you can give tools to it and you can send like a message to it to say, I would like you to send an email and it will go off and then look at the tools it's got available and then complete that task for you. And it can also do multiple tasks. So you could say, you could go a bit deeper and say, well, I would like an email and then also send a calendar invite to this person asking me if they're available and it will go off and do that for you. It's really clever how it works.

Katie: Okay, so for those listening and also a little bit for me as well. So how is an AI agent different to just say like normal AI automation?

Noel: So I would say an AI automation, you have an input and then an output and it's kind of linear, so you will just go from one end to the other to complete a task, which is great, and it does a great job, but what an agent will do is it will, it could have multiple routes, and then it would say, well, I need to go and use this tool over here, and it will come back, analyze the response, and then go, right, well, the next step is to use the other tool that I've got, so it would go off and do that until it's all complete, and then it will then send that back to the back to the user.

Katie: But yeah, this is

Noel: incredible how it works. Okay.

Katie: So that sounds really cool and really awesome. But for anyone who's struggling to get their head around it, do you be able to give an example of how someone can use that AI agent within their business?

Noel: So I think the big plus for, especially with small business owners or solopreneurs with agents, is there's always that thing where you've got too much to do, but you haven't got enough that you can then go off and employ somebody else. I mean, I have that problem in my business at the moment. So it's like, but if I had an AI agent, I could create a set of agent teams. So I could create myself a marketing department. I could have a business development department or commercial and things that. So, you know, we can then link all of those agents together. And then I could say to it, can I have a social media post about AI agents? And the agent would look at it and go, right, okay, well, that agent over there, that's the one that does marketing and that's where that bit goes and it will go, well, I need a post and I need an image. So it will go off, it will speak to the marketing agent. And then that agent then has separate tools and they will go, right, I've got a tool that will create the post. I've got one that will create the image. Then once all that's done, it sends it back up to the main agent at the top. I call it like an executive agent because they're kind of like that top level manager of the agents. And then they send that response straight back through.

Katie: So it's almost like having a virtual assistant to do certain tasks. Definitely,

Noel: yes. But the things you could give it are endless. So with some of the tools out there, you can link up to, you know, you could link any application as long as it's got like a, what you call an API endpoint. So if the app that you use, say whether it was Notion or HubSpot, things that, they've all got their own APIs.

Katie: So you

Noel: could link those into there as well and say, well, you know so you could ask your agent and say well can you go off and qualify this lead and it will go off interrogate your CRM and then come back and do all those sort of tasks as well for you so yeah that's kind of roughly how it works

Katie: so we were having a bit of a conversation before we hit record on this podcast episode and i loved how excited you were about AI agents and you were like they're just going to be a game changer so can you give us like a bit more why you think these agents are going to be such a game changer for business owners.

Noel: Yeah, I just think they're just going to make life so much easier for a business owner where you can just sit there, you could be on WhatsApp, you could be on Telegram, and you can just type a message to your agent and it will go off and just do those jobs for you. So or you could set up schedules for your agents to do certain tasks. And that kind of frees you, frees up business owners to to stop doing all these mundane tasks that take up so much time of their day. know, and then allows them to just get on and do the stuff that actually delivers value to their, to their clients instead of going, well, I need to now, now have qualified that lead, I need to go into HubSpot. They need to move them into a qualified section. You could have an agent set up where, let's say we're on an onboarding call. You could fill out a form while you're on that call and then go off and then say to the agent, look, here's all the answers to our preset questions, and then it will go off and then create the, add them into your CRM, it could then create a proposal and then send that off to the client, you know, within minutes of finishing the call.

Katie: Without you having to do anything other than okay. Yeah.

Noel: I mean, I suppose you should probably check it before you send it to the customer, but it could put it in your draft box. Yes.

Katie: So these AI agents, like we said, they're exciting. They're a game changer. You know, they're going to free up a lot of time, maybe save us quite a bit of money. but how do you even like get started with one like where do you even begin to like I guess like for me it's identifying what I want it to do and then it's even like getting started with I guess you would have to build your own

Noel: yeah so I would say you would need to not not everything needs automated that's kind of pitfall for people when they they start looking to automations and AI they just go I'm going to do everything but really you need to identify the key tasks that you do that you do that you do that you're it could be better done or quicker done by the AI. And basically from there, I would then use tools like N-N-A-N. It's a bit of a mouthful. But that's a no-code drag-and-drop platform. And they have a built-in AI agent within their platform. And all you need to do is connect the tools in and connect it to an AI model. Give it a prompt, let it know what's there, what it needs to do. And then you can connect it into any sort of, you could trigger it by email, by Telegram, and WhatsApp and all that sort of stuff. So, you know, you don't need to be some sort of tech whiz to do this sort of stuff. It's kind of building out like a flow diagram of what you've got to look like. Yeah.

Katie: Okay. And we'll put the links below as well with how people can get started with building their own AI agent as well. Absolutely. Yeah.

Noel: It's exciting.

Katie: Yeah, it does. It sounds really excited. And I'm really, like, intrigued to see, like, how. this is going to shape business owners, like in the next year or so. Yeah, I just feel like, I know we've had these conversations like AI is moving so fast and it really is. But what are you, just like from a personal point of view, what are you most excited to see come from AI agents?

Noel: So right now that they're really good, but I think we could do, they could do better. So the way, the way in which you're connecting the tools is kind of clunky and is a little bit, technical with some of them and how that all sort of works. So making that side of things easier for, you know, for anybody just to pick it up would be, would be incredible. You know, just being able to, you know, say you went on chat GPT and say, well, I would like an agent that connects this to this, you know, it's got these tools. Here's my logins for those tools. You hit enter and then it's just off it goes and it's done. That'd be awesome.

Katie: So you've got to give your AI agent your logins for these different platforms and is that currently safe to do it?

Noel: So yeah, with like tools like make.com and and you have to input your API or logging credentials for each tool that you use. So the AI doesn't get to see those, it's just the application and you're just giving it access to those programmatic points where it can talk to each other. It's all safe.

Katie: Okay, perfect. All right. Noel, anything else that you want to mention about AI agents? before we enter this episode. Hang on, people. How long have you got?

Noel: There's so much that you could talk about, really. Yeah, what I would, I guess I would reiterate the point is, you know, is looking at your business processes, growing out what you could automate that, and then just getting in there and giving it a go. You don't need to be some sort, you don't need to know any sort of coding language. You know, it's all drag and drop. It's beginner friendly to a point. Yeah, right. It's just get out there, give it. ago. Who knows we should probably build an agent for this podcast.

Katie: Yeah, that would be good. Let's try and do that. And if you are listening to this podcast episode and you do have any questions about AI agents that you would like us to answer on future podcast episodes, then just send them into us and we will try our very best to answer your questions. Okay, thank you so, so much for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. like and subscribe and we will catch you on the next episode very

Noel: soon.