Imagine multiple powerful assistants working as a team or multiple teams, custom-built to handle the tasks in your business, freeing you and your team to focus on what matters most or reducing workforce to cutdown operational cost. That's the magic of AI agents!
AI agents are not to be confused with simple Large Language Models (LLMs) you might encounter online. These advanced AI systems go far beyond generating text. They are intelligent software programs that can learn, adapt, and collaborate with other AI models to automate complex business workflows.
In today's world, many see Artificial Intelligence (AI) as just LLMs such as OpenAI's ChatGPT and Google's Gemini. However, AI actually refers to technology enabling computers to mimic human intelligence and problem-solving. This includes machine learning and deep learning models. AI encompasses specialized models like computer vision for images, NLP for language, audio processing, and multimodal models that can handle different type of inputs. GPTs are a subset of generative AI tools.
Basic LLMs and chatbots
As seen in the image above, LLMs lies at the base of the pyramid. LLMs excel at taking prompts (questions) and delivering informative answers. Built on top of those are the chatbots. Think of chatbot as LLMs with short-term memory. This short-term memory enables to function LLMs as the chatbots by passing in the chat history of the conversation. That is great for just chatting with the knowledge base the LLM already has.
But, how do we make it answer questions about our own documents or websites or about latest news? You may think, we could just pass in all the documents as text info to the LLM and ask questions to it as prompts. Yes, your thought process is absolutely correct. But, a significant limitation of LLMs is their context-window size. In abstract terms, the context window size is the maximum length of the input text sequence that the model can handle. For example, GPT-3 has a context window size of 1024 tokens. This means that the model can only handle sequences of 1024 tokens. This limitation makes it difficult for us to send the larger information to the LLMs.
Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)
This is where RAG comes in. RAG allows us to tap into external knowledge sources like websites, databases, documents. The high-level overview is that RAG uses something called Vector database and this allows us to magically pull only the informations that are relevant to our prompt. This way, instead of sending multiple documents, we can just send relevant informations to the LLM. This empowers AI to answer complex questions that go beyond its internal knowledge base. Most of the customer service chatbots today work this way.
So, by using RAG, we can personalize LLMs to answer questions about our custom data without fine-tuning the model. This is like having a LLM with long-term memory.
AI Agents
Imagine a scenario where an LLM can search the internet to find leads and filter them based on your specific criteria. Furthermore, what if it could craft personalized emails or messages for cold outreach by emulating your writing style after conducting thorough research and analysis on each lead? It could even send these emails and messages automatically. Indeed, this exactly is the potential of AI Agents.
While LLMs are impressive in their ability to reason, generate text, translate languages, and answer your questions in an informative way, AI agents take things a step further. They act as a central hub, with access to a toolbox of various AI models and functionalities. You can think of Agents as intelligent softwares with all the abilities of LLM plus having long-term memory with access to various tools, functions and APIs
Common Misconceptions about Agents
There's a common misconception when talking about AI Agents is that people always think of AGI (Artificial General Intelligence).
AGI refers to a type of AI that possesses the ability to understand, learn, and apply knowledge across a broad range of domains at a level comparable to human intelligence. What we expect from AGI is, given a prompt like do this or that, the AGI should plan all the necessary tasks step by step and executes them flawlessly. At the core, AGI are super AI agents with likely LLM at its core. The current state of LLM doesn't allow to us to achieve such level of perfection suitable for production ready applications, yet. In AGI, we depend solely on unguided AI to do all the heavy lifting from task planning to execution.
However, AI agents we build are systems designed to perform specific tasks or a narrow range of tasks. These agents operate within a predefined set of rules or frameworks and are optimized for particular applications. We diligently program agents in a structured way, guiding execution with conventional software development methods. This allows us to maintain fine-grained control over the workflow and use the combination of various specialized AI (machine learning and deep learning) models, tools, APIs as in traditional software, employing LLMs, Vision Language Models (VLMs) selectively and only when necessary, even with the option to have Human in the loop for approval before making critical decisions. This approach enables us to achieve AGI-level performance with a higher degree of accuracy, specifically tailored to our business workflows.
With recent release of GPT-4o and PaliGemma VLMs, the AI agents could cover more usecases with ease. As AI technology continues to evolve, AI agents will become even more sophisticated and versatile. If you're looking to streamline operations, improve efficiency, and gain a competitive edge, consider incorporating AI agents into your business workflow.
As we’ve explored, the potential of AI agents is vast when harnessed and developed correctly. That's where we excel.
Our technical in-house experts craft bespoke solutions just for your business, ranging from simple to complex workflows. Contact us today to discuss how we can transform your workflows and help you stay ahead in the competitive landscape.
Here's what you will get with our custom built AI and Automation solutions:
We don't share or spam your email with marketing or promotional contents.
Complete this form to book a short discovery call where we can learn more about your situation and see if we're a good fit.
Book your free discovery call where we learn your situation and see if we're a match.