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AI agents are the next frontier in artificial intelligence, empowering businesses to supercharge productivity. While many see AI tools as a threat to human jobs, I view them as a way to maximize your efforts. With agents, for example, you can create high-quality content and get more value from meetings—knocking out tasks that once took hours in minutes.
AI agents operate in three stages: they first perceive their environment through models like natural language processing or image recognition. Then, they apply algorithms to reason and make decisions. Finally, they continuously learn, refining their decision-making and performance over time.
At Jotform, we’ve spent the past few months integrating AI agents into our internal workflows. I’ve seen the results firsthand: faster manual tasks, fewer errors, and greater engagement among our employees. With our new AI agent tools, we’re offering that same efficiency to our users, helping them automate their daily workflows and slash hum-drum busywork. Here’s how AI agents can help you accomplish hours of work in minutes.
Creating High-Quality Content Faster
Today’s business owners understand the value of organic marketing: creating lasting relationships by organically connecting with customers—for example, through engaging blog posts and newsletters. You might not see immediate results, but organic marketing is about the long-term strategy. That’s why content creation is essential for modern-day entrepreneurs.
AI agents can help you to produce polished content quickly—be it drafting newsletters, brainstorming blog posts, or refining website text—and significantly reduce the time you spend writing, editing, and mulling over ideas.
Take Claude—developed by Anthropic, Claude can help you create websites, documents, and more, all sounding natural and human. It also has an easy-to-use chat interface. Let’s say you’re creating a website for your startup. By letting Claude build the foundation—generating strong first drafts, a task that can take hours if not days (trust me, I’ve been there)—you can dedicate your time to making sure your website is clear, compelling, and visually appealing. With Claude handling the initial draft, you can focus on fine-tuning your messaging, optimizing the user experience, and ensuring your site stands out.
Getting More Out Of Meetings
I try to schedule meetings only when other forms of asynchronous communication won’t cut it. Still, many issues and tasks are faster accomplished with a brief tête-à-tête, so I find myself with at least a few meetings per day. Time is precious and in order to extract the most from these meetings, I use AI agents to handle the manual tasks that I don’t enjoy but make meetings actually worth the time—like preparing agendas, note-taking, drafting summaries with action items, and scheduling follow-ups.
Luckily, there are numerous agents to choose from. Grain, for example, is a sales platform with an AI agent that can take notes in sales meetings, and provide summaries, insights, and even coaching—feedback and recommendations to help sales professionals improve their performance. For instance, it might make note of any missed opportunities or offer a sales representative tailored tips on closing more deals. Grain can also generate post-meeting task lists and follow-ups.
Taken together, you’re knocking out hours of meeting-adjacent work in mere minutes, giving you more time to focus on the actual meeting content and reflect on how to make future meetings more successful.
Speeding Up Your Research And Boosting Knowledge
As the business world evolves at an ever-faster pace, a growth mindset is essential for keeping ahead of the ball. Coined by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, a growth mindset entails understanding that intelligence and capabilities are malleable. Continually learning and enriching your knowledge and skills is critical, especially in the age of AI.
AI agents can act as your learning assistants by scanning and summarizing reports, articles, and data sets. They can accomplish hours of manual reading and synthesis in just a few instants. You can use a tool like HARPA AI, which uses AI models like GPT-4 and ChatGPT to streamline research tasks. The interesting thing about this agent is that it operates directly in your browser, so you get the benefit of its various tools to gather and analyze information with no additional effort on your part. It can summarize web pages and articles, but also YouTube videos—given today’s increasingly filmed podcast and YouTube show-driven information circuits, that can be an extremely powerful tool. You’re left with concise summaries and pertinent data, saving you valuable time.
Offering Better, Streamlined Support
I firmly believe that listening to customers is essential for business growth. Even the best idea can fall flat without a strong customer service team to support it.
AI agents can automate parts of the customer service process that tend to be slow and tedious. For example, Botpress lets businesses build tailored AI agents that can handle routine customer interactions by leveraging LLMs and other automation techniques. You can develop, test, and refine agents in real time, streamlining the support process. As a result, customers receive faster assistance and feel heard. At the same time, your customer service team can redirect their time and focus to higher-impact work—such as learning new automation tools and resolving novel and customer challenges—rather than getting bogged down by standard inquiries.
Achieving Faster, Smarter, More Efficient Sales And Marketing
AI agents can become another powerful tool in your sales teams’ arsenals. Unlike popular chatbots, which essentially rely on scripts to handle customer inquiries, agents are dynamic. They can act without instructions and use their learning capabilities to search for information and independently reason and make decisions. What’s more, they can act on input to execute multiple steps in a sequence—again, all without any human input.
Salesforce, for example, has rolled out its Agentforce platform, aimed at enhancing sales and marketing operations. With Agentforce, you can build an agent that has access to all of the data and insights from your Salesforce platform. Your agent can continually analyze customer data, provide insights, and take action. For instance, if your agent notices increased engagement somewhere, it can signal an upsell opportunity and draft a tailored email to a potential new customer.
Ditching Tedious Data Entry
For most businesses, data management is essential—but it’s also tedious, error-prone, and tends to be more of an energy drain than a boost. AI agents can step in and relieve employees of these manual tasks.
Lutra AI, for example, is an AI agent that tackles data-related tasks. It can sift through unstructured data—think PDFs, emails, or even images—and extract relevant information. Once it has the data, it can clean, organize, and process it, allowing teams to act on it quickly. It also integrates with tools you’re probably already using—Airtable, HubSpot, Google Sheets, Gmail, and Outlook, which means it can work within your existing workflow.
AI agents can execute time-consuming data-related tasks in minutes, leaving your team more time to focus on analysis, strategy, and decision-making—higher-impact tasks that are likely more engaging as well.
