What is an AI Agent?

The last year and a half we've gotten used to advanced AI chatbots allowing people to ask questions to for instance ChatGPT. However, we've just recently started understanding AI agents, and most people don't understand the difference.

AI Agents, Next Level AI Chatbots

An AI Agent built upon AI workflows is the evolutionary "next step" for your AI chatbot. An AI chatbot can produce text, but can't do anything with the text. At best it can give you a recipe for what you need to do in order to perform some task.

An AI agent on the other hand can actually do stuff. What "stuff" to do is up to you, and can be any task that can be performed using a computer. Some tasks an AI agent can do are listed below.

Order a flight ticket
Book a table at a restaurant
Answer one of your emails
Search the web
Book a meeting

An AI agent can in theory do any task you are doing when you're using one of your applications. Example applications can be for instance.

Your CRM system
Your accounting system
Your airliner's online booking system
Uber app to order transportation
Facebook
GMail
Etc ...

Since a single human being can manage hundreds of AI agents performing different tasks, the cost savings should be obvious.

AI Agents is about cost savings!

How AI Agents work

LLMs such as ChatGPT and Claude can produce text. This text can be structured output such as for instance JSON. JSON allows us to execute "API functions." API is a software developer acronym and means "Application Programming Interface." APIs allows one application to use another application automatically, without needing a human being to click buttons or provide input. One program can create JSON to provide input to another program.

This allows one application to use an API to perform tasks that typically requires a human being interacting with a program. When you're booking your next flight ticket online for instance, the graphical user interface you're using will typically use an API to actually book the ticket. By having another computer program consuming the API directly, you can remove the need for a human being sitting in front of the computer and fill out a form for your next flight ticket.

Imagine a question such as; "I want to book a flight ticket from London to Oslo the 21st of August." An AI agent might respond with something resembling the following to such a question.

{
  "departure": "London",
  "destination": "Oslo",
  "date": "21st of August 2024"
}

The above is JSON and can be sent to your airliner to book a flight ticket, simulating a human being sitting in front of a computer and choosing departure city, destination city, and date. The airliner doesn't differentiate between a human being or another application. For your airliner the above JSON is just as valid as you creating a booking using the airliner's website. The AI agent won't show you the JSON, this will typically be hidden from you, and it will display something such as; "I am about to order a flight ticket for you from London to Oslo on the 21st of August 2024, please confirm." Once you've confirmed, it will send the above JSON to your airliner's API.

Providing your AI chatbot with access to APIs is the equivalent of "teaching it new tasks." A good AI agent system can handle thousands of different APIs. This allows a good AI agent to perform thousands of different tasks, where your job is reduced to instructing it what to do. The difference between an AI agent and an AI chatbot can be summed up as follows.

An AI chatbot tells you how you should wash your dishes. An AI agent washes your dishes automatically!

The above of course is an exaggeration, but illustrates the difference quite well using an analogy.

AI Agents, the Future of Work

Everything you do with your computer today can in theory be turned into an AI agent. Writing emails, hiring people, firing people, booking a table at a restaurant, posting to Facebook, ordering a housemaid, etc, etc, etc - And at AINIRO we've delivered AI agents that does almost all of the above.

AI agents are about working smarter, allowing you to "outsource" parts of your manual and time consuming jobs to the AI. In such a regard AI agents will inevitably change how we work. Some people are afraid of this, and fear loosing their jobs. At AINIRO we believe this fear is not justified as long as you embrace AI and learn how to use it to your advantage. At AINIRO we've delivered hundreds of AI agents, with different capabilities. We've delivered shopping AI agents, assistants AI agents, investigator AI agents, and everything you can imagine - So we obviously know what we're talking about here.

If you fear that AI will steal your job, your fear will become the truth, because instead of learning how to become better by using AI you will fight it. This is a fight you will loose. If you on the other hand embrace AI and AI agents, you can use it to your advantage, while delivering higher quality results and become more productive without having to work more. People able to deliver high quality and more results than others, will become more valuable for obvious reasons. AI agents is the means you can use to achieve this.

AI will not replace you, a person using AI might though!

Have a Custom AI Solution

At AINIRO we specialise in delivering custom AI solutions and AI chatbots. If you want to talk to us about how we can help you implement your next custom AI solution, you can reach out to us below.