We are all inundated by the the term Artificial Intelligence, to the point of saturation. Everyone wants something to do with AI, build around AI or position their company around AI. You’ve heard that term 5+ times in the first few lines in this post. It’s reached such a ridiculous point that i recently saw a mattress company say that their mattresses are AI enabled. I was baffled, so i went through their blog to see what “AI Powered Sleep Solutions” meant and this is the best i could find..
Wakefit Zense is India’s pioneering AI-driven sleep ecosystem designed to revolutionise sleep quality. Powered by artificial intelligence, it offers innovative solutions to enhance sleep health, marking a significant advancement in the realm of sleep technology.
I’ll leave a link below, if anyone can tell me what “AI Powered Sleep Solution” is, i would be grateful. I spend most of my waking hours working on AI, why should’t i do the same when i sleep!
When i first tried ChatGPT and it responded to every question i threw at it, i was blown away. Now, it seems mundane, but “back in the day” Wolfram alpha was the closes thing to an intelligent solution i had interacted with, and ChatGPT was miles ahead!
Ever since that day, I’ve been tinkering with LLMs, mostly just to see what I could do with them. After a couple of years of building and experimenting, I’m sure of one thing—AI Agents are the future.
There will be more AI Agents than there will be humans
– Mark Zuckerberg
What are AI Agents?
It’s the technology that makes science fiction like star trek com-badges into reality
Think of AI Agents as your personal Star Trek com-badges, but instead of just connecting you to the ship’s computer or your fellow crew members, they connect you to a whole universe of digital tasks and processes. In the Star Trek world, you’d just tap your com-badge and say something like, “Computer, locate Captain Picard,” and boom—the ship’s systems spring into action, finding exactly what you need.
AI Agents work much the same way, but instead of being limited to a starship, they operate within your digital world. Whether it’s managing your emails, analysing customer feedback, or automating a complex workflow, you simply “tap” your AI Agent by giving it a command, and it handles the rest. It’s like having a team of digital crew members always ready to execute your orders.
But here’s where it gets really cool: just like the combadge integrates seamlessly with the Enterprise’s systems, AI Agents blend into your daily operations. They don’t just follow orders—they anticipate your needs, learn from your preferences, and adapt to your way of working. It’s like having a tiny piece of Star Trek tech right here, helping you run your business or life more smoothly, efficiently, and intelligently.
AI Agents are a necessary, but not sufficient condition to make a technology like ComBadges & Jarvis a reality.
What makes AI Agents so powerful?
Agents operate autonomously, processing information, making decisions, and performing tasks—much like a human would.
The term AI Agents may be complex to really comprehend but the simplest way to understand AI Agents is that they try to emulate what humans would do while performing a task. Agents beyond just answer questions like the AI chatbots we see everywhere today, they not only have the ability to answer questions from a knowledge base but also take decisions and perform tasks for you, just like a human would. To understand the power of AI Agents lets take a look at a real world scenario where agents would thrive, but chatbots, even AI chatbots would fail.
AI Chatbots vs AI Agents
The Scenario: Canceling a Subscription
A customer decides they want to cancel their subscription. They start by interacting with an AI Chatbot. The chatbot, designed to pull information from a knowledge base, can guide the customer through the basic steps of cancellation. It might say something like, “To cancel your subscription, please visit this link or follow these steps…” It’s quick, straightforward, and provides the necessary information.
However, the chatbot’s interaction is purely transactional. It doesn’t consider why the customer is canceling or whether there’s an opportunity to retain them. It can’t pull up the customer’s history, identify their value to the company, or offer any retention strategies.
Enter the AI Agent: A Smarter Approach
Now, let’s see how an AI Agent would handle this scenario. When the customer requests to cancel their subscription, the AI Agent first pulls up the customer’s profile. It checks their subscription history, usage patterns, and any past interactions they’ve had with support. The agent notices that this customer has been with the company for several years and frequently uses premium features.
Armed with this information, the AI Agent can offer a personalized retention strategy. It might present the customer with a special discount, an upgraded plan at a reduced rate, or a temporary pause in billing to accommodate a specific concern the customer has raised in past interactions.
If the customer still chooses to cancel, the AI Agent can handle the cancellation process seamlessly. But it doesn’t stop there—the agent intelligently raises a ticket for the customer’s feedback, which gets routed to the retention team for further analysis. Additionally, it might automatically send a follow-up message or survey to understand the reason behind the cancellation, helping the company improve its services in the future.
Why It Matters
In this scenario, the AI Chatbot provided basic assistance but couldn’t go beyond that. The AI Agent, on the other hand, used customer data to craft a personalised response, potentially saving the subscription or at least gathering valuable insights for the company. The agent’s ability to apply discounts, intelligently manage customer interactions, and ensure a smooth experience makes it far more effective in handling complex customer requests.
AI Chatbots are excellent for handling routine tasks, but when it comes to scenarios where customer retention and personalised service are key, AI Agents take the lead. By using both, businesses can offer a more dynamic and responsive support experience.
Conclusion
Eric Schmidt of google recently gave a talk at Stanford and emphasised on the importance and future of AI Agents. I don’t have to say much to conclude this post, just read what his observation around AI Agents is & gives us a clear idea on the future, and why it is AI Agents.
Say I want a recipe to make a drug. I ask, “What’s the first step?” and it says, “Buy these materials.” So, then you say, “OK, I bought these materials. Now, what’s my next step?” And then it says, “Buy a mixing pan.” And then the next step is “How long do I mix it for?”
That’s called chain of thought reasoning. And it generalizes really well. In five years, we should be able to produce 1,000-step recipes to solve really important problems in medicine and material science or climate change.
The second thing going on presently is enhanced agency. An agent can be understood as a large language model that can learn something new. An example would be that an agent can read all of chemistry, learn something about it, have a bunch of hypotheses about the chemistry, run some tests in a lab and then add that knowledge to what it knows.
These agents are going to be really powerful, and it’s reasonable to expect that there will be millions of them out there. So, there will be lots and lots of agents running around and available to you.–Eric Schmidt
Former CEO of Google
