By Hitesh Ganjoo, CEO of Iksha Labs
Technology has been an integral part in the evolution of human beings. It is our biggest tool to lead our lives more efficiently. We always looked at technology as merely a tool to get things done quickly. Now with the advent of AI agents, they no longer serve us merely as a tool or help us in automation, but also help us to collaborate on our work and get things done seamlessly.
The recent advanced models like GPT-4 or Claude do not just follow your instructions, but they can also help to even plan, reason, respond and collaborate just like how your teammate or your colleague does in your office.
So, what is an AI Agent? They aren’t your usual chatbots that give you automated responses. AI agent is actually a system that can understand your large complex goals and breaks them into necessary steps to get the work done. In this process, it will interact with other systems or people as required just how your teammate approaches a particular task. Gone are the days when you have to give step by step inputs to get a particular output. It will figure out on its own on how to get the work done and will report back to you when the task is completed.
For example, if you are a social media manager in an organisation, a traditional tool might help you to write captions or schedule posts. But with new AI Agents, it would do the complete workflow. It would check the trends, match appropriate content to suit your audience, create graphics using Canva or such tools and draft the posts with relevant headlines. So it has become your teammate now. Isn’t it?
How did this happen? The reason for this change is because AI agents are able to break down your high level goals into actionable steps without the need to give continuous inputs. It can think right from researching a topic, summarise the key data and draw conclusions as well.
The biggest shift is that you no longer need to write every line of code to get what you want. Its ability to understand and interpret text, images, data, and even audio makes it an exciting tool for collaboration. This opens up new dimensions and endless possibilities. These AI agents can also access and interact with our systems like email, calendars, browsers, or databases. They move swiftly across apps, handling multiple tasks seamlessly.
Many big companies are already in this process of using these AI agents as a teammate. These agents can code, debug, deploy and do all the tasks which are usually done by a junior engineer.
Tools like AutoGPT can carry conversations, follow up, escalate any problem without any human intervention. Even in sales and marketing, AI agents are able to analyse CRM data, write cold emails and so on. The companies can now assign routine tasks to AI agents, and instead focus the same time to work on more complex tasks which need creativity. They can completely focus on activities which needs a human interaction and an emotional connection.
Now with the way the AI is making rapid strides across all the sectors, there is a glooming fear that AI will take away our jobs. Whenever a new technology has emerged, there are always these doubts and apprehensions. When things like calculator or computers came into existence, people have expressed similar doubts.
It’s important to see these AI agents as collaborators rather than competing with it or complaining about it. You can level up on your skill which focuses more on growth and creativity. Startups with a limited team size can now automate or delegate repetitive tasks like customer support, basic user research, generating content or financial reports with the support of AI agents. While you can you rely on them on these background works, you can work simultaneously scaling up your businesses while reducing your operational costs.
Time and again our history tells us that human beings have the ability to adapt to new technology and changes. Therefore, the real challenge lies in delegating the necessary tasks to AI agents and make them as our collaborator without losing our uniqueness as human being. The real question is how ready are we to make it work for us effectively?