Short answer
An AI agent for business is one piece of software with one job and permission to act. Something happens, it reads your own data, applies rules a person wrote down, does the work inside your tools, and reports back. One agent, one job. The companies that get value run several of them, not one that does everything.
Key takeaways
- An agent has a job, your data and permission to act. A chatbot has none of the three.
- Start with one job that repeats weekly and has a rule somebody can state out loud.
- Across the agents we have built: 30+ meetings in six weeks, 60% fewer repeated questions, 1,380 hours a year.
- Four to eight weeks from the first call to one agent in daily use.
What an agent is made of
The agents companies actually run
- 1SalesBuilds the list, writes the sequence, sends it and sorts the replies. 30+ meetings in six weeks for an SEO agency. AI sales agent.
- 2Customer serviceDrafts replies from your own documents and escalates what it cannot answer. First response down 60%. AI agent for customer service.
- 3Internal questionsAnswers the team from approved company documents instead of a senior person answering the same thing again. 60% fewer repeats. Case study.
- 4Order and data entryTurns an email and its attachments into a record in your system. Eight markets and five freight modes on one build. Case study.
- 5Search across your own recordsAsks and answers over 45,000 candidate records, returning the shortlist as a file. 12 hours a month per recruiter. Case study.
- 6Reviewing content at volumeWatches and scores 10k+ videos a month against your own criteria. Case study.
How to pick the first one
| Good first agent | Bad first agent | |
|---|---|---|
| Frequency | Happens weekly or daily | Happens twice a year |
| Rule | Somebody can state it out loud | Nobody agrees what it is |
| Input | Arrives in writing | Lives in somebody's head |
| Mistake | Caught by a person before it matters | Reaches a customer or an invoice |