Questions and answers
What is an AI agent, and what can it do for a business?
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The short answer
An AI agent is software that carries out a task for your team, not just a chat window that answers questions. It reads the information it needs, takes steps in the systems you already use, and stops to ask a person when a decision or an approval is needed.
How is an agent different from ChatGPT?
A chat assistant such as ChatGPT answers when someone types a question. The person still copies the answer, opens the right system and does the work.
An agent is built around one job in your business. Something that happens starts it, such as a new enquiry or an upcoming meeting. It works with your documents, email, calendar or customer records, and it either finishes the task or hands it to the right person with everything they need.
What can an agent do in a typical office?
- Collect the details of each new enquiry and prepare a reply for approval.
- Prepare a one-page brief before a client meeting: earlier emails, decisions and open questions.
- After a meeting, send a summary and the agreed tasks to the people responsible.
- Answer employees’ questions from internal documents, showing where each answer came from.
- Remind the right person when a customer has been waiting too long.
Each of these is a small, well-defined task. That is where agents work best.
Who stays in control?
You decide what the agent may do on its own and what needs approval. A common start is that the agent prepares and a person approves before anything reaches a customer.
The agent works only with the systems and information you connect, under the same permissions as the employee it helps. It keeps a record of what it did, so the team can check it.
What agents do not do well
Agents are weak at vague goals, judgement calls without clear rules, and tasks where a single mistake is expensive and cannot be checked. They also depend on the information they get: if the price list is out of date, so is the answer.
That is why we start by choosing one process with clear inputs, clear rules and a person who owns it, and we test the agent on real examples from your work before anyone relies on it.
How to start
Pick one task that repeats every day or week and wears the team down. Write down how it is done today and who approves what. That is enough for a first conversation.
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