By esantiago@hubspot.com (Erica Santiago)

On 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 sneaking around like spies, completing tasks for marketers.

Obviously, that‘s not completely true (they don’t wear suits), but they are very helpful to marketers and are predicted to greatly improve their efficiency and productivity.

AI agents are the latest AI trends to crop in sales and marketing, but are they worth it? Let’s get into some of the points covered in the episode:

• What is an AI agent?
• When to Use AI Agents
• AI Agents in Content Marketing
• Concerns with AI Agents

What is an AI agent?

According to Shah, an AI agent is a piece of software that uses AI to accomplish a multi-step goal.

“There are varying definitions of what an AI agent actually is,” he says. “There is a spectrum of capabilities. You have very simple agents and sophisticated agents that do multi-agent things and reasoning.”

But whether we’re talking about simple AI agents or more complex ones, the standout feature is their ability to carry out multistep goals that require different functions. According to Shah, this capability separates them from AI tools such as ChatGPT.

Think of it like this: When I use an AI tool like ChaGPT, it’s a simple back-and-forth interaction. I make a request, and the chatbot responds.

“Whereas with an agent, you’re giving it a higher order goal, and it may need to invoke Language Modeling (LM) or multiple LMs and use other AI tools and some classic tools to pull together whatever goal you’re trying to accomplish.”

A simple way to think about it is that AI agents are the next generation of automation tools to streamline marketing workflows and tasks.

When to Use AI Agents

So, when should you use an AI agent instead of a standard AI tool like a chatbot? This is actually what I find most interesting about the podcast‘s discussion of AI agents.

When we think of AI, it’s hard to banish the thought (fear) of it replacing humans. However, Shah explains that an AI agent is most helpful when a human is needed to kick off the task, but many steps can be taken without human intervention.

For example, let’s say a small business owner wants to route leads in their CRM using ChatGPT. They could plug customer data into ChatGPT to see what the chatbot generates.

However, if they want to take things a step further, they could use an AI Agent to bring them the most recent company numbers added to the CRM to conduct research.

They could then …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron