Artificial intelligence is a fashionable topic nowadays. And 2025 is said to be the year of the AI agents. So, you, as a business executive seeking to create more prosperity for you and your business through better-selling products and streamlined, much more efficient business processes, may be wondering how you can leverage the AI agent’s capabilities to help you achieve that goal.
Let’s start by defining what AI agents are. AI agents are pieces of autonomous (or semi-autonomous) software components that can partially or totally automate a workflow.
But what does “autonomous” exactly mean? Does it mean that there is no human intervention or interaction? Well, almost, but not (more on this at the end of the article).
Autonomous means that the AI agents are capable by themselves of realizing the actions required to execute a workflow based on a set of instructions you provide to them, coordinating with other AI agents to execute those actions, and automatically generating a result.
AI agents can do so because they have access to enormous databases of knowledge known as Models. So, once you provide instructions to the AI agent about what you want to do (by using natural language), the AI agent will look at those models for the exact steps to accomplish what you asked for. These steps may include asking for data, retrieving data from specific data sources, using a tool (software app) to generate something, interacting with other AI agents to generate something, etc. What is revolutionary here about the AI agents is that they can understand your needs (aka, words), figure out what to do, and coordinate the necessary work for themselves. All of this occurs without the need for human intervention, or more accurately, almost without any human intervention.
So, it may seem straightforward how to leverage AI agents in your business, right? Let’s “hire” these pieces of software that can think for themselves and do the job more quickly and efficiently than our current workers, costing less money for the company and with no complaints. Cost reduction, business efficiency, and peace of mind at its best level! Indeed, it’s not as straightforward as it seems.
First of all, business automation is not human annihilation! “Hiring” AI agents does not necessarily mean “firing” your current employees. Business automation means transforming your current employees into more strategic players. AI agents are great at performing repetitive and tactical jobs, but they typically lack context and emotions, which are key to properly reasoning and making business decisions.
Also, AI agents are not prone to errors. They may fail. There is a very well-known concept in artificial intelligence called “hallucination.”. That means that sometimes the models the AI agents get the knowledge from are incomplete, causing the AI agents to infer that missing knowledge by themselves and making up false concepts or information. Therefore, it is crucial for humans to oversee the AI agents’ tasks.
Finally (regarding human being intervention), AI agents are not created out of nothing. Guess what, yes, you need human beings to create them. Are we talking about software engineers? My answer is: ideally. I know that the less-code, no-code platform promises to convert non-IT-related professionals into software solutions developers and that even Jensen Huang, NVIDIA CEO, suggested in an interview at the World Government Summit 20241 that the fact that natural language (and not a specific programming language) is used to provide the instructions to the AI agents will make every person around the world a potential programmer; the reality is that AI agents must be created by people with solid and proven knowledge in business modeling and software design. Otherwise, you risk ending up with insecure, non-scalable, and bad-performing software solutions.
And now, let me tell you about the cost factor. AI agents are far from being free (at least by now). You require a platform where the AI agents reside and execute. You require tools and connectors for external systems, and once again, you require people to create, supervise, and maintain those AI agents.
So, what are my suggestions to leverage AI agents in a cost-effective and less risky way?
· Map your business first! Automation is about your business, not technology. So, always start any automation process by modeling your business. This will help you and the person or company helping you with the process to identify the tasks that can benefit the most from automation.
· Start with the simplest, less risky business tasks. Start with a proof of concept. Don’t try to implement very complex or data-sensitive processes at the very beginning. This will save you headaches and money.
· Don’t do this at home! This means that if you don’t have at least some experience in software development, it’s best not to attempt this alone. Look for guidance from individuals and companies with a solid understanding of business modeling and software architecture (besides AI intelligence, of course).
· Look for a robust platform to host your AI agents and ask the person or company who is helping you to properly map and forecast the associated costs of every different paid component you must use in that platform. Once again, at this moment, AI-related services and software components are a little bit expensive because they require a huge computation power to be executed, so you don’t want to be surprised with a very big number in the bill you receive from your AI platform provider at the end of the month. That is another reason to always consult with an expert and not do this by yourself.
I sincerely hope that you now have a better understanding of what AI agents are and how to start incorporating them into your company. We are here to help you in this process. We would love to discuss the fascinating world of AI Agents with you. Just drop us a line here.
AI generation disclaimer: We did not use any AI models to generate the content of this article. It all comes from our knowledge and experience on this matter. However, we employed an AI tool to review the grammar and provide recommendations for the redaction process.
References:
https://blogs.nvidia.com/blog/world-governments-summit/