To be honest, when I hear the word “agent,” the first thing that comes to my mind is a slick, fast-moving character in an action thriller clad in all black and getting things done with scary efficiency and great hair.
And this is exactly the difference between AI models and AI agents.
If you’re here, it means you’ve (like me) used AI in one way or another — maybe to generate text, tweak a presentation, or create a professional headshot. Chances are what you used was an AI model — a tool designed to assist with a specific task.
AI agents, on the other hand, take things several steps further.
Unlike AI models that simply generate outputs based on prompts, these so-called AI agents act on it. They don’t just assist — they remember, learn, and make decisions on behalf of the user. Just like a human colleague would.
And businesses have taken notice.
In this article, I’ll explore what these AI agents are, how businesses are using them, and what this means for how professionals exist and execute.
Table of Contents
- What is an AI agent?
- How AI Agents Are Revolutionizing Businesses
- How to Use AI Agents in Your Business
- Examples of AI Agents for Business
- Should your small business invest in AI agents?
- AI agents are shaping the future of business.
What is an AI agent?
An AI agent is more than just a chatbot or automation tool. It’s an autonomous system that can perceive its environment, make decisions, and take action to achieve specific goals.
These agents are tailored to have a specific expertise and operate with minimal human input while continuously learning and adapting.
“Think of agents as the new apps for an AI-powered world,” says Jared Spataro, Microsoft’s chief marketing officer for AI at Work.
Traditionally, completing a task requires navigating multiple apps, each with a specific function. AI agents change this by managing entire workflows, pulling information from various sources, and adjusting to user needs in real time.
Instead of simply assisting, they execute, making work more seamless, efficient, and intelligent.
How AI Agents Are Revolutionizing Businesses
AI agents “…open up a whole set of opportunities for working with people to get tasks done, and that’s what we expect from AI systems,” says Ece Kamar, managing director of Microsoft’s AI Frontiers Lab.
“AI agents are not only a way to get more value for people but are going to be a paradigm shift in terms of how work gets done.”
And we can see this taking full effect in the market trends for AI agents.
The global AI agents market is projected to reach $7.6 billion this year, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 45.8% from 2025 to 2030.
This growth, according to research, is driven by the rising demand for personalized customer experience, automation, and advances in natural language processing (NLP) — all of which AI agents are designed to deliver.
And that’s across different business functions and industries. From customer support to ecommerce, logistics, etc., businesses are using AI agents to streamline workflows and do better work.
1. Customer Service
In customer service, AI agents are replacing conventional chatbots by delivering human-like interactions that are well beyond human capabilities.
As Alan Paton, CEO of Qodea, explains in conversation with Forbes, “An AI agent will provide any startup with instant scale. Suddenly, they can offer global customer support, in any language, that exceeds the standards of their biggest competitors.
“Customer questions and complaints can be responded to at any time of day and answered in such a sophisticated way that the customer won’t be aware that they are not talking to a human at all.”
2. Sales and Ecommerce
Consumer trust in AI-driven shopping is also growing and this, of course, affects the way salespeople interact with their customers.
A recent survey revealed that when it came to online shopping, customers were likely to use AI agents to book flights (70%), find and book hotels and resorts (65%), clothes (53%), beauty products (56%), and even over-the-counter medicine (51%).
With this kind of statistic, the demand for AI sales agents will undoubtedly grow.
In an interview with McKinsey, Jorge Amar, senior partner at the firm, shares, “It used to be the case that dedicating an agent to an individual customer at each point of their sales journey was cost-prohibitive. But with the latest developments in gen AI agents, now you can do it.”
And this is because these agents are not just designed to recommend products but to manage the entire purchasing process, offer tailored suggestions, handle payments, and even coordinate returns when necessary.
3. Business Operations
AI agents are also changing the way businesses run their internal operations. Especially with procurement.
According to the 2025 ProcureCon Chief Procurement Officer Report, 90% of procurement leaders have considered or are already using AI agents to optimize operations in the coming year. These agents help these professionals automate complex contracting tasks, analyze procurement data, etc.
According to the head of research at ProcureCon Insights, Chris Rand, procurement leaders are moving from reactive to proactive approaches.
As a result, this new set of leaders are “not only embracing AI, but demanding a tech-first approach to sourcing and contracting processes that welcomes AI as a coworker in the ongoing race to capture more revenue.”
How to Use AI Agents in Your Business
The way businesses use AI agents depends on how the agents are developed. Here are some of the use cases for AI agents and how businesses are implementing them.
1. Automatically handle customer support queries.
If you’ve ever sat on hold waiting for a human agent, you already know how valuable instant help can be.
AI agents are brilliant at handling repetitive customer service queries like checking order status, updating shipping info, or explaining return policies. This doesn’t just save time; it seriously improves the customer experience.
Moreover, as Paton pointed out, AI support agents have become so sophisticated that customers won’t be able to tell that they’re not talking to a human.
According to Gartner, by 2029, these systems will be resolving 80% of common customer service issues completely autonomously with zero human intervention.
2. Transcribe, summarize, and generate action items from meetings.
The first time I used an AI agent for meeting management, I was starstruck. It recorded the meeting (audio and video), transcribed everything, pulled out the highlights, and even suggested next steps.
It honestly felt like I’d just hired a personal assistant with an Ivy League degree, the world’s sharpest ears, and a dash of superpowers.
Since the shift to hybrid and remote work, our time spent in meetings has nearly quadrupled. No surprise, then, that AI for meetings is booming. According to Fellow’s State of Meetings 2024 report, usage of AI tools in meetings grew 17x between January and August 2024.
AI agents now help teams stay aligned, cut down meeting fatigue, and make follow-ups effortless.
3. Customize product and content recommendations.
Netflix’s recommendation engine is the classic example of AI-driven personalization. These AI agents learn what you love and surface just the right product or content, right when you’re likely to want it. McKinsey reports that personalization like this can boost revenue by up to 40%.
And it’s not just movies. Wine apps like Vivino and Hello Vino use AI to recommend bottles based on taste, labels, and reviews.
In retail, Carrefour Belgium tested a virtual wine assistant called Sommelier Benoit, built in just three weeks using Google Cloud, Dialogflow, and Google Assistant. It handled 600 customer interactions in the first 10 days.
4. Extract data from official documents.
No one enjoys combing through contracts or spreadsheets — but AI agents do. They’re built to scan, understand, and pull out exactly what you need, almost instantly.
JPMorgan Chase built a tool called COiN (Contract Intelligence), which can read and interpret complex legal documents in seconds. It analyzes text, tables, and even scanned images to extract key information. This is work that used to take legal teams over 360,000 hours annually.
By using AI in this way, companies not only save massive amounts of time but they also reduce human error and free up their people to focus on higher-value work.
5. Support employee onboarding.
Starting a new job is exciting but also full of “Where do I find that?” moments. AI agents smooth out onboarding by answering common questions, helping with benefits enrollment, and walking new hires through tools and policies.
American Addiction Centers used Gemini for Google Workspace to cut down their onboarding time from three days to just 12 hours.
I think Sumit Sehgal, their CIO, put it best: “If you can take something that used to take two or three days and take it down to a couple of hours, 10 minutes, or 15 minutes, that’s amazing. That’s a force multiplier.”
With AI agents acting as always-on HR buddies, new hires get up to speed faster and with less friction.
6. Search and knowledge access.
Sometimes the most powerful AI agent is the one that simply helps you find the right answer, fast. These search agents can comb through massive knowledge bases, Slack threads, documents, databases, and more to surface exactly what you’re looking for in seconds.
It’s like having a company-wide expert in your pocket — one that never sleeps, never forgets, and always knows where everything lives.
NewsCorp, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, uses Vertex AI to search and process data across 30,000 global sources and over 2.5 billion news articles daily. That’s a great example of how AI can unlock insight at scale.
As Sateesh Seetharamiah, CEO of EdgeVerve, puts it, “We see AI agents as augments for human potential, not replacements. We use them internally to automate workflows, process large amounts of data, and support real-time decision-making.”
I believe this perspective is key to understanding how AI agents can be deployed effectively within your business.
Examples of AI Agents for Business
1. HubSpot’s Breeze Prospecting Agent
Get Started With Breeze Prospecting Agent.
This is for the sales team.
Breeze is built to make prospecting feel less like cold calling in the dark and more like having a GPS straight to your best leads. It automates outreach, personalizes messaging, and engages prospects at just the right moment.
If I were running a sales team, I’d be all over this. No more endless guesswork.
Pro tip: Check out HubSpot’s other AI tools for your business.
2. Aisera AI Agent
Aisera is an AI-driven customer service and IT support agent that provides conversational AI and automation for enterprises. It helps businesses resolve support tickets autonomously, reducing the need for human intervention while ensuring personalized and intelligent responses.
Imagine a support agent that never sleeps, never gets frustrated, and actually gets what customers want. That’s Aisera. It’s the AI agent companies deploy when they’re serious about cutting response times and improving customer satisfaction.
With its self-learning capabilities, Aisera continuously improves interactions, making it ideal for IT help desks, HR support, and customer service teams looking to enhance efficiency and user experience.
3. Onyx
If you’ve ever wasted hours hunting for that one email, document, or Slack message buried under an avalanche of files, you’re not alone. That’s where Onyx AI comes in.
It’s like having a supercharged personal assistant that knows where everything is across your company’s apps, whether it’s Google Drive, Notion, Slack, or any other platform you use daily.
What makes Onyx a role model AI agent is its ability to go beyond basic keyword searches. It understands context, meaning you don’t have to remember exact phrases. Just ask naturally, and Onyx finds it for you.
It’s also open-source, which means companies can tweak and customize it to fit their workflow, making it perfect for teams handling large amounts of data and those in knowledge-heavy industries like law.
4. Agentforce Service Agent
Agentforce is Salesforce’s AI platform designed to create and deploy autonomous AI agents across various business functions, including customer service, sales, marketing, and commerce. Agentforce Service Agent is a specific application within this platform, enabling businesses to enhance customer service operations.
Unlike traditional chatbots that rely on pre-programmed responses, Agentforce Service Agent uses generative AI to understand and address a wide range of service issues autonomously, operating 24/7 across self-service portals and messaging channels.
This agent can manage returns, track orders, troubleshoot issues, and even escalate problems when needed, all while keeping interactions natural and context-aware.
And since it’s built on Salesforce, it integrates smoothly with existing CRM systems. That’s a huge plus because nobody wants yet another disconnected tool that doesn’t talk to the rest of their business software.
5. William by StoryChief
Built by StoryChief, this AI agent helps brands create, manage, and optimize content. It’s like having a marketing strategist who never runs out of fresh ideas. From blog posts to SEO recommendations, William ensures businesses put out high-quality content without burning out their teams.
I also find it interesting that William can audit existing content and identify relevant issues like underperforming content, outdated content, trending topics, as well as opportunities for expansion.
Should your small business invest in AI agents?
If staying competitive while saving time and money means anything to your small business, then absolutely!
AI agents aren’t just for big corporations anymore. Small businesses are now using them to do their work better. In fact, data from the United States Census Bureau shows that businesses with just 1 to 4 employees are among the biggest adopters of AI, second only to large companies with 250+ employees.
While big corporations have been leading the way, small businesses have been quietly stepping up their AI game throughout 2023 and 2024, and according to the data, this trend is likely to continue into the near future.
As Alan Paton points out, AI adoption is rapidly increasing among small businesses and soon, using AI agents will be the standard way of working.
“We are seeing more small businesses embracing AI agents. I believe in time that it will become the standard operating model with everyone using AI for a multitude of simple and complex tasks. We’re only at the very start of the AI revolution, and we’ve just scratched the surface of what is possible.”
That said, AI isn’t a magic fix. I think it works best when paired with clear business goals and human oversight. Small businesses must first start by identifying which of their business functions would benefit from being handled by AI agents and determine if it’s worth the investment.
AI agents are shaping the future of business.
While there are still many challenges for agentic AI to get around — from AI’s energy crisis to data reliability problems to regulatory bottlenecks — I believe that AI agents aren’t just a passing trend. They are the future.
In Kamar’s vision of the future, people would come to rely on AI agents for increased productivity just as they rely on the apps on their smartphones.
“Agents already have the basic building blocks of what it takes to complete a task. Like observing, ‘I can see your meeting is taking longer; I should delay the next meeting,’” she noted.
That’s not just automation. That is intelligent, proactive support.
For businesses, I believe adopting AI agents is no longer about playing catch-up with the trends. Rather, it’s really about future-proofing your solutions.
