Imagine having a team of AI experts working for your business or agency 24-7. Now, I'm not referring to purely the generative AI tools available that many of us are using daily. I'm delving deeper.
Actual AI employees performing higher-level, complex tasks that humans at big companies are paid the big bucks to do, but at a thousand times the speed, accuracy, and at a fraction of the cost. This technology is reminiscent of data from Star Trek. Remember how he analyzed complex situations and instantly gave Captain Picard suggestions?
Well, Star Trek is already here, and it's improving faster than warp speed. To get a taste of its potential, see what Mark Zuckerberg has to say about AI agents. One of the things I think is really important is basically making it with a relatively small amount of work.
A business can basically, in a few taps, stand up an AI agent for themselves that can do customer support. Sales, communicate with all their people, all their customers. I kind of think that every business in the future, just like they have an email address and a website and a social media presence today, I think every business is going to have an AI agent that their customers can talk to in the future. And we want to enable that for all of those.
It's going to be hundreds of millions, maybe billions of small business agents. I mean, AI employees managing your sales and operations? This is insane.
These agents are the exact secret weapons that local businesses and agencies need to gain a killer edge over the competition. But how do they work and where can you access some of this revolutionary tech? Stay tuned because I'm going to break down exactly what AI agents are and help you understand their applications and I'll give you a demo of a couple of the employees that you can hire for your business or agency today.
Now first let's start at the ground level. What are AI? agents. Now here's how Amazon defines this technology.
An artificial intelligence or AI agent is a software program that can interact with its environment, collect data, and use the data to perform self-determined tasks to meet predetermined goals. Humans set goals, but an AI agent independently chooses the best actions it needs to perform to achieve those goals. Now this is a big deal because it goes way beyond simple automations.
Instead of just following prompts and orders and workflows, AI agents can actually think on their feet, adapt to changes, and even teach themselves new tricks. An AI agent works by perceiving its environment, processing information, and taking action to achieve specific goals or tasks. The process usually involves the following steps. Perceiving the environment. The AI agent gathers information about its surroundings using sources including the web, social media, and of course a local businesses or agencies internal data.
Processing inputs. The collected data is organized and prepared for processing, creating a knowledge base or internal representations that the AI agent can understand. Decision making. The AI employee uses reasoning techniques such as logic or statistical analysis to make informed decisions based on its knowledge base and goals. And there's planning and execution.
The agent develops a plan or strategy to achieve its goals, optimizes resources, and executes the steps. It can also adjust its actions based on feedback and new information from the environment. And now that's a great segue into understanding the broad arc of capabilities and use cases that these AI employees can bring to your business or an agency. A primary function is to suggest new products and services based on real-time trends, analytics, and information, just in the way a human team would.
So AI agents adapt by perceiving changes in consumer behaviors and trends because they're continuously monitoring the vast treasure trove of information and activity on the web to make real-time recommendations to businesses about their strategy. So let's think of a use case. Imagine a clothing store franchise. Now, typically these companies have teams of people that monitor Instagram, TikTok, competitor websites, all them hashtags, every day to stay on top of viral trends.
Now, an AI employee can probably do that better. It can monitor and analyze social media trends and competitor activities really, really well, but then cross-reference that with your sales data to suggest new products that are likely to be in high demand, helping you stay ahead of trends without all that manual monitoring. Then there's responding to market activity and competitor pricing. AI agents can take actions based on their perceptions to influence the environment.
Now, for example, an AI agent might adjust pricing in real time on an e-commerce website in response to market activity. Let's think of another use case here. So think of, say, a local electronics store. Competitor pricing and market demand fluctuate frequently for parts, right?
An AI employee can monitor competitor prices. and market conditions in real time and automatically adjust the website pricing to stay competitive. This dynamic pricing strategy ensures that the local electronics retailer remains competitive without constant manual adjustments and monitoring. Then there's operational improvements.
AI agents excel in problem solving, whether it's optimizing a supply chain issue, diagnosing a technical fault in a manufacturing process, or identifying the most effective marketing strategy. They navigate challenges and offer solutions often beyond what human capacity is in terms of speed and efficiency. So what's a use case?
Operations and logistics are one of the biggest pain points for local manufacturing businesses. Supply chain disruptions can cause significant delays and increase costs and prevent customers from getting things as quickly as they want. An AI employee can analyze your supply chain data.
identify potential bottlenecks and recommend optimizations to streamline that entire process. Now for instance, it might suggest alternative suppliers or more efficient shipping routes helping you reduce delays and lower costs even without the extensive resources that a large corporation may have. Essentially many of the factors that we look for when we hire human employees like autonomy, perception, the reaction time, reasoning, decision making, learning and communication skills, and setting goals, these are the very same traits that also distinguish between what AI employees are versus tools like ChatGPT.
So now that I've explained the different use cases, I want to list out the kinds of AI agents or employees today. After I list these out, I'm going to walk you through a couple of the tools that you can immediately implement. Now, if you're a local business, Here are the main types of AI agents that make sense for small and medium businesses to use. And if you're an agency, you need to get on these tools and look at how you can help integrate them within the AI tech stack for your clientele. Now, there are three that are particularly relevant to you if you're a local business or agency.
The first are goals-based agents. Now, as the name suggests, these AI employees... are designed to achieve specific goals based on individual contexts and frameworks.
While that sounds simple, make no mistake, these are highly, highly advanced agents. They leverage tons of data, machine learning, natural language processing, etc. for use cases including customer and prospect communications and conversations. The second are utility agents.
These AI employees can form the backbone of key business activities and operations, like analysts and managers, at bigger companies. For example, these agents can analyze competitor prices and adjust pricing to maximize revenue, or they can optimize staff schedules based on labor costs, customer demand, and employee preferences. The third and the most powerful is the autonomous AI employee. Now, I'll go through a demo in a moment, but this agent has a high degree of autonomy and can independently break down tasks, set sub-goals, and learn from their experiences to achieve their primary objective. They are like having the perfect business process consultant who can work out everything you need to do in order to execute an activity or strategy.
There are a couple of other types of agents as well, but these are often a smaller. but still very important cog in the AI wheel. And I've listed them on the screen quickly.
So you've got your simple reflex agents. These are the most basic. They react to their environment without thinking about the past or future. Think of a thermostat turning on or off based on the current temperature.
You've got model-based reflex agents. These agents have a bit more smarts. They can remember things about the past to help them decide what to do now. So imagine a robot that remembers it was cold yesterday so it might turn on the heat a bit earlier today. Then you've got learning agents.
These are more advanced, they can learn from their mistakes and get better over time. Think of a robot that learns to play chess, better the more it plays. Okay, I'm excited because I'm about to show off a couple of AI employees that you can hire right now and I'm using some of these very tools for my own business which is my own agency. Okay, so I'm going to show you a demo of two AI employees that you can use today. Okay, so the first one is an AI-assisted lead capture.
This one's from Mendasta. I'm using it as an illustrative example. And this here is a website of a board game company here in Canada that's using this tool.
Okay, so, you know, we're used to chatbot answering some general questions, but we want to start feeding them. custom knowledge so that they can start answering some specific queries from customers. So my favorite card game is Magic the Gathering. So I'm going to ask this chatbot, hello, do you stock Magic the Gathering cards?
I'm just going to send this query here. Hello, yes, we do stock Magic the Gathering cards. In fact, we even have a dedicated e-commerce website for selling Magic the Gathering singles.
Well, there you go. And that's the type of specific example that I, as a customer, need to know. I need to, the main product I buy is singles.
So it's good to know that they have singles. Another more general question is, hey, what are your store hours? What are your stores?
And let's see what it does for that. Okay, open seven days a week. And it's got specific hours for each day. Notice what this tool is doing in terms of from the business owner's perspective.
It's asking, could I get your name and contact details so that I can have someone from your team get back to you if you have any more questions. Okay, so that's the lead capture element. And when I submit my information, and I'll just do that.
My name is Vishal. My name is Vishal, and my number is 306-1111. Let's just send that away. See what it does. And what it's going to do is, thanks for providing your contact information.
Someone from our team will reach out to you soon. Now, that has gone to the local business owner, the owner of the card game store. And now they have me as a prospect within their database, within their CRM. Right? So it's answered general queries.
It's answered specific queries. And it's also helped them capture me as a lead. Okay, so that's a great example of an AI employee.
It's not only answering useful questions, but it's actually capturing business for the board game store here. Now, another example here is this tool called AgentGPT. I'd love for you to check this out. It's agentgpt.reworked.ai. And, you know, we use generative tools like ChatGPT to come up with copy, edit copy, help ideate.
This helps you. develop a whole process and list down tasks for something you might need to do. So let's pretend I'm a dentist, okay? So this tool is pretty simple to use. I've given my GPT a name, Dentist GPT.
So let's say I'm a dentist or I'm an agency working with a dentist, and I want to come up with a campaign for my customers for a new teeth whitening product that I want them to try out. So let's just come up with something I want to do here. So help me come...
up with a marketing strategy strategy for a new tooth whitening product that I want to sell okay and then we'll hit play here okay and let's see what it's gonna do okay so you can see here whereas with generative tools it's with the generative tool it's going to give you a specific idea on how to do it. This is going to do that but also add some Higher level tasks that you need to get done in order to execute this campaign. So let's read this here Task added conduct market research to identify target audience and competitors will make sense You probably want to see if competitors are offering this Develop a unique selling proposition value proposition for the tooth whitening product The next task is create a marketing plan outlining the product positioning target audience marketing channels promotion strategies Then you go on to the next task execute the marketing plan by advertising, social media, influencer collaboration, and other marketing activities. So you can see that it's not just giving you, it's not just telling you, hey, you know, like what the underlying ideas are. It's giving you the process to help execute the campaign.
Okay. And here it's provided some useful information that it's scraped from the web that could help you execute that campaign, that you can use at every stage of the process. Okay, so those are some of the tasks.
And then it's given you, then it's scraped some data from across the web to help you understand some of the market research that you might want to use in helping you position your strategy. So it's actually provided some really interesting information that you might want to use for this campaign. Okay, and then it's gone on to provide more tasks, develop your unique selling proposition and value proposition for the tooth whitening product. It's given some more useful information. and then it's added a new task, create a marketing plan, outline your product positioning, and so on.
The key thing really here is you're not just asking it back and forth questions around what I should do. It's providing you with the whole process and it's providing you with useful information as well. So this is like an ultimate AI assistant slash employee analyst and researcher and administrative genius that's... helping you break down the tasks for the strategy and providing the useful information to execute that strategy at the same time. This stuff is incredible.
A ton of value out of today's video and gained a solid understanding around AI agents slash employees and how they work. As the CEO of Nvidia said, the world is in the midst of its third industrial revolution thanks to AI. In the same way as mass manufacturing and the internet have changed the way we all live and work, AI is the next frontier of opportunity for local businesses and how they interact with customers.
And AI employees will be a central part of how this revolution will pan out. Because they offer everything from improved productivity, being able to do those high-value tasks in mere seconds, and reduced costs, thereby giving local businesses and their agencies a competitive edge, and informed decision-making prowess based on machine learning and real-time data. All the while it's going to mean faster, more efficient and personalized experiences for customers and free up employees from doing laborious monitoring tasks so that they can add that unbeatable human touch and refinement to an AI-assisted strategy or task. Please don't forget to give this video a like, hit that subscribe button and that notification bell. It helps us out a lot.