Think of one task that your team does multiple times a day, every day. If that task was removed from everyone’s plates, how much faster could that team work? AI agents can relieve a lot of this labor, using artificial intelligence to get work done faster and more accurately, with parameters that are tailored specifically to your business’s tasks and workflows.
AI has lots of flashy and exciting applications that are hard to apply in a practical way to business. AI agents take the opposite approach, blending intelligent tools directly into your work processes at the points where help is most needed. In a recent survey by Capgemini, 82% of large companies said they planned to implement AI agents in the next 2-3 years.
AI agents augment human labor, helping precisely where they are needed so that workers can focus on the tasks where their skill, expertise, and judgment are most needed.
If an AI agent is evaluating and ranking submitted resumes, your hiring team just needs to dive into the top candidates. If an AI agent is assembling thorough prospect summaries for your sales team, they can dive into calls more informed without spending too much time on prep. If an AI inspections agent is quickly assessing a property and logging issues, your property management team can visit more locations and take more consistent notes at the same time.
To be most successful, however, your AI agent needs to be customized to fit perfectly into your existing tools and systems. This is Glide’s specialty. Glide’s AI agents are highly specialized point solutions that are customized for the unique needs of each business. This guide will help you evaluate how and where you can deploy these AI agents most effectively.
How does a Glide AI agent work?
At the most basic level, an AI agent receives an input, completes a task, and then produces an output. Then a human can review the output and use it to continue their work.
Agents can incorporate more steps depending on the complexity of the task that needs to be completed, but the basic structure remains the same. At its simplest, an AI agent can be seen as a “one-button app” that replaces a task that a human employee would otherwise have had to do. At its most complex, an AI agent can automate entire workflows, organizing large amounts of information and connecting lots of different software into one interface.
AI agents are not generalists. They are designed for a specific task and customized for the needs of your specific business. That means an AI agent is a pointed solution aimed at relieving a bottleneck extremely efficiently.
What makes Glide AI agents different?
Glide’s AI agents are more independent, more specified, and more customizable than any of the other agents currently being developed.
Large platforms like Salesforce, Intercom, and Microsoft have launched AI agents that are integrated with their platforms. They specialize in helping you use that specific platform better, performing tasks like customer service or personal assistant-type tasks within the Microsoft ecosystem. These tools are powerful, but they aren’t adaptable to other uses or customizable to your unique needs. If you’re not already in one of those tools’ ecosystems, deploying one of those agents will be expensive and complicated.
A Glide AI agent can be applied anywhere in your business where you have repetitive work that is slowing your team down. It will be adapted to work with your existing software, data, and processes. It’s lightweight and doesn’t come with lots of excessive features or obligated add-ons. If you have other needs, you can deploy another agent for that specific need.
How businesses are deploying AI agents
There are lots of businesses using Glide AI to perform tasks for their teams and accelerate processes across their businesses.
Oscar Brooks of V88 Agency has helped dozens of companies deploy specialized AI agents—and he also uses them internally at the agency to track projects and give customers automated updates. He believes AI to be one of the most effective and adaptable productivity tools he can provide to his clients.
“We use AI to take out some of the human elements and replace them with automated processes,” Oscar explains. “The outcome for business owners is their team is able to be more productive. You're giving people more of their time back every day, and they're spending that time doing the things that they're good at. The impact can be massive.”
AI sales agent: Closing deals faster with client summaries and automated proposal drafts
MintLeads is a rapidly growing lead generation agency that used an AI agent to triple the number of sales calls its team was closing. “We went from 5 deals per month to 15+ deals closed per month after launching the AI agent,” said their Director of Strategic Initiatives, Jack Folwy. It allowed us to scale roughly 1,500% in the last year and a half, which is insane.”
They hit a bottleneck early on—their sales team only had so much time in their day, and a lot of that time was being occupied by administrative work. They deployed AI agents to help at both ends of the sales process. At the beginning of a call, their salesperson would get an AI-generated summary of the lead, with data pulled from Hubspot and previous conversations. This helped them go into calls with more background without spending time on prep.
During or immediately after the call, the salesperson can disposition their lead with one click. If they hit “ready for a proposal,” it triggers another AI agent. This agent pulls the information discussed on the call from AI-generated notes. It assembles those notes into a comprehensive proposal, fills in HubSpot contact information for the lead, and generates a proposal email right in the salesperson’s Gmail account. All they have to do is review the proposal and hit send and the lead gets a near-instantaneous follow-up with very little work on the end of the sales team.
“It’s saved us at least 15 minutes per call, which allowed us to double the number of calls we could put on our salespeople's calendars. That translates directly into the raw output of closed deals,” he said. “Now it's all automatic. We can have our sales guys go from back-to-back calls. They can just close deals.”
AI field report agent: Generating fast customer updates from construction sites
Build-360 is a construction company that used an AI agent to cut the time they spent on customer updates by 90%. Their founder, Robin Hahn, created a mobile field application with an AI agent called “update client.” This agent scrapes project information from their files, pulls photos and notes from their field manager’s site visit, and pre-assembles an email update for their client.
"We have to do 10 or 15 updates a week and just one field manager who is out there on the job sites. Manually, it could take over half an hour to put together an update,” said Robin. “With the AI agent, it only takes 2-3 minutes. The amount of time that it saves every single week is just incredible."
Their team is saving a lot of time, and the AI agent is also able to give more thorough updates than a person would have time for. It even pulls in accurate weather updates to let the client know what to anticipate for the upcoming days of construction. The result is more satisfied clients in an industry that isn’t typically able to offer that sort of thorough information using technology.
Deploy your AI agent where it's most needed
The best way to start using AI in your business is to start with one painful process. Identify where your team is spending the most time and what parts of your process are getting in the way of your bottom line. The next step is to get in touch with Glide.
Glide’s development partners will work with you to better understand your process, your needs, and your goals as a business. They’ll then tailor an agent to support those goals and connect it to the rest of your systems. Within a few weeks, you’ll have a specialized custom tool ready to go.
