In a recent Marketing Against the Grain podcast episode, HubSpot founder and CTO Dharmesh Shah sat down with hosts Kipp Bodnar and Kieran Flanagan to discuss the rise of AI agents.
When I heard the term “AI agents,” I thought of little robots that sneak around like spies and do tasks for marketers.
Of course, this is not entirely true (they don’t wear suits), but they are very helpful for marketers and are expected to significantly improve their efficiency and productivity.
AI agents are the latest AI trends will decline in sales and marketing, but are they worth it? Let’s move on to some of the points covered below:
What is an AI agent?
According to Shah, an AI agent is software that uses AI to achieve a multi-stage goal.
“There are different definitions of what an AI agent actually is,” he says. “There is a spectrum of skills. There are very simple agents and sophisticated agents that perform tasks and reasoning with multiple agents.”
But whether they are simple or more complex AI agents, the standout feature is their ability to achieve multi-stage goals that require different functions. According to Shah, this capability sets it apart from AI tools like ChatGPT.
Think of it this way: When I use an AI tool like ChaGPT, it’s a simple back-and-forth interaction. I make a request and the chatbot responds.
“With an agent, on the other hand, you give them a high-level goal, and they may have to invoke Language Modeling (LM) or multiple LMs and use other AI tools and some classic tools to put together the goal you want to achieve.”
A simple way to think about it is that AI agents are the next generation of automation tools for optimizing marketing workflows and tasks.
When should AI agents be used?
So when should you use an AI agent instead of a standard AI tool like a chatbot? This is what I find most interesting about the podcast discussion about AI agents.
When we think about AI, it is hard to dispel the thought (fear) that it could replace humans. However, Shah explains that an AI agent is most helpful when a human is needed to start the task, but many steps can be completed without human intervention.
For example, let’s say a Small business owner wants to route leads using ChatGPT in their CRM. You could plug customer data into ChatGPT to see what the chatbot generates.
However, if they want to take it a step further, they could deploy an AI agent to provide them with the most up-to-date company numbers added to the CRM to conduct research.
You could then set up rules about how lead writing should be done.
“With today’s technology and AI agents, this is all possible,” says Shah.
Essentially, AI agents should be used when “you know what to do manually, and you could do it manually – but you want to automate some of those steps rather than trying to do this kind of one-off attempt with ChatGPT,” he said the statement Shah.
AI agents in content marketing
If you are a content creator and marketer like him, you are probably curious about how AI agents can help in the field of content marketing, such as creating blog content, social media posts, videos, and graphics.
I’ve said in the past that marketers should think of AI as a digital assistant. If that’s the case (and it is), think of AI agents as your digital team.
“The really exciting thing about these agents is that they can actually benefit each other,” explains Shah.
As an example, Shah cites generative AI tools and the need for images generated for your business to match a style and color palette specific to your brand.
“So I developed an agent called Color Palette Extractor,” he says. “It’s a very simple agent. All you need to do is assign the homepage or any webpage to it. It will take a screenshot of that webpage, determine what colors are used, and show you a palette proportional to the percentage of the area that color took up.”
In other words, the AI agent generates a color palette based on the webpage you fed it.
You can then pass the color palette created by the agent to another agent, who will incorporate that palette to generate images or other content.
“So these are two agents who knew nothing about each other until you creatively stuck them together,” he says.
From there, you can take the image and run it through a LinkedIn post generator, incorporating the results from the previous two agents. This means three agents work together as a team to create content for your business.
Concerns about AI agents
While listening to the podcast, Shah, Bodnar, and Flanagan’s excitement about the possibilities offered by AI agents was unmistakable.
Shan Event mentions a future where AI agents could be treated almost like employees and a natural part of marketing teams.
“One day agents will have a salary of, say, $2.00 a month, or whatever the price may be,” he says.
While I mentioned that humans are still needed when deploying AI agents, there are concerns about what a human’s role might look like when it comes to teams of AI agents.
Personally, I think one explanation would be that even with the addition of AI agents, human marketers will continue to be an integral part of the marketing process. They just need to improve their skills and consider a supervisory role.
Think about it: Even the largest teams need a leader and supervisor.
Jeremy Kahn, AI editor at Fortune Magazine, seems to share my opinion in an interview with Fortunate Magazine.
“We need to redefine human roles and focus on higher-level capabilities to monitor systems. “I expect that humans will monitor multiple AI systems simultaneously and act as both guides and judges of the outcomes of these systems,” says Kahn.
So is investing in AI agents worth it?
In my opinion, any technological advances that can streamline processes, free up time for marketers, and keep their businesses competitive are worth investing in. However, with great AI advances comes great responsibility.
In pretty much every post I’ve ever written about AI (and I’ve written a lot), I’ve said that AI best practices include overseeing, reviewing, and adding a human touch to every AI-generated output. And that doesn’t change with the use of AI agents.
In fact, I think it’s even more important to oversee your team of AI agents and tools because more machines mean more cooks in the kitchen.
So take a look at AI agents and think about how they can make your life easier as a marketer or business owner. Just make sure you supervise your team of agents.