Free AI GPT Agents

AI Agents in Support Tools and Processes

When you hear the term ai agent, you might picture a helpful personal assistant like Jarvis from Iron Man or, more on the scary side, the amoral HAL 9000 from 2001 A Space Odyssey. In fact, there are plenty of examples of ai agents in everyday life--and the success they have at meeting their goals depends on how well they fit into our support tools and processes.

AI agents are autonomous software programs that interact with their environments by perceiving their surroundings via sensors, and acting through actuators or effectors (like grippers or wheels) to achieve specific tasks. The agent’s performance is defined by its ability to learn and adapt through the experience of accomplishing its objectives.

An AI agent can be proactive or reactive; the former identifies problems or changes in its environment and acts to improve the situation, while the latter is designed to help with repetitive or monotonous tasks that require little creative input from humans. Agents that are hierarchical (divided into levels of capability and complexity) distribute work based on the ability and complexity of each level, with higher-level agents monitoring lower-level ones to ensure that all goals are met.

Autonomous agents operate robots and other machinery, such as self-driving cars, in industries like manufacturing and transportation. They can monitor systems in real-time, detect abnormalities, and make decisions without human intervention. They also optimize production processes and predict maintenance needs in industrial facilities and improve supply chain management and logistics in retail.

Intelligent agents can perform repetitive tasks and identify patterns in data, such as Netflix’s recommendation system or credit card fraud detection software. They can also analyze large amounts of information and make quick decisions in the blink of an eye. They reduce human error and work around the clock, eliminating fatigue or the need for breaks, to provide services or support at any time a user needs them.

Generative ai agents take the guesswork out of creating and editing documentation, making it easier for your team to create how-to guides and other types of content that support your customers. They can even write first drafts for you, saving you and your teammates the time and hassle of writing them yourself. For example, a tool called ai summarize uses generative AI to automatically take the main points from lengthy customer conversations and create an easy-to-read bullet point summary, saving you from having to manually summarizing conversations yourself. Many other generative AI tools-like Help Scout’s ai assist-act as your personal writing assistant, enhancing and optimizing the quality of your documents to help you write better.