What is an AI agent

0:00 A portion of this video is sponsored by Lovable. Now, without further ado, let's get going. All right, let's first start off with a crash course on what is an AI agent from a practical perspective. An AI agent is defined as a software system that uses AI to pursue goals and complete tasks on behalf of users. For example, a customer service AI agent would be able to take user queries and help them solve their problems. Or a sales assistant AI agent would be able to qualify leads, book meetings, and follow up with sales prospects.

0:45 There are lots and lots of different types of AI agents, but each AI agent is made up of six core components. The first one is model. This is the brain that powers the AI agent. And this can be Chhatabi, it can be Claude, it can be Gemini, it can be small models, it can be big models. Next up, AI agents need tools to be able to perform their respective task. For example, a personal assistant AI agent would need to be able to have access to things like your calendar in order to book appointments.

1:08 Then there's knowledge and memory. A therapy AI agent needs to remember the sessions that they had with a patient over multiple sessions. And a legal agent may need to have access to a knowledge base of specific cases that it's meant to be analyzing. Audio and speech. Many AI agents will have language capabilities to be able to more naturally communicate with humans. Guardrails are safety mechanisms to ensure proper behavior. You don't want your customer service AI agent to be swearing at people, for example.

1:30 And finally, there's orchestration. These are systems to deploy and monitor and evaluate your AI agents. You don't want to just make your AI agent and release them into the wild and not care about what happens afterwards. You can have all these different components there, but if you don't know how to assemble them properly, then it's also not going to work out. You can give your AI agent like the best tools out there, but if you don't tell it that it has these tools and it doesn't know how to use it, then it's completely useless.

1:52 That's why people spend a significant amount of time working on the prompts. All right, that is our little crash course today on the theory of building AI agents. If you do want to have a little bit more in-depth um explanations for things, I did make like a full video over here that you can check out and it goes into a lot more depth, but this is enough for us to build our first AI agent and we're going to implement all of these different components and the prompt using NA10.

2:14 But first, let's do this quick little assessment which I will put on screen now. Please answer these questions to make sure that you fully understand what it is that we just talked about. Okay, so this is NAN which is a flexible AI workflow automation tool and it's going to be what we're using to build our first AI agent. Okay, so after you sign in, you can create a new workflow.