By Kristen Kinsella, Brian Birch, and our cutsie wootsie little AI friends

AI is moving so fast, it's hard to keep up! But there is a trend related to AI ‘agents’ that you can’t ignore! It's more than just a proprietary ‘assistant’, much much more than that!  With a little creative prompting, it can even make a 1960s "Get Smart" spin-off comic based on this article.

Agentic AI is a key way humans will begin integrating AI into our daily businesses and lives.

Agentic AI refers to artificial intelligence systems that can autonomously (key word!) pursue goals by making decisions, taking actions, and adapting to changing circumstances, often with minimal human input. A gentic systems can "decide what to do next" based off criteria you give it. Key traits include goal-directed behavior, autonomy, environmental awareness and adaptivity, and long-term reasoning. Here are some examples:

• Microsoft has integrated agentic capabilities into its Copilot suite, allowing users to build custom AI agents for specific business processes within the Microsoft 365 ecosystem
• Oracle integrates AI Agents into its Fusion Cloud Applications Suite to automate tasks across all core business functions
• Amazon leverages Alexa technology to create more sophisticated agents for business applications through "Alexa for Business."

Another trend is multi-agent collaboration, which explores teams of AIs working together toward common or complementary goals. Additionally, there is an increasing integration with real-world tools, where agents can operate browsers, databases, APIs, enterprise software, and even interact with robotics. Holy smokes, that's pretty scary, eh?

For small organizations, agentic AI offers the potential to automate complex tasks and streamline workflows that might otherwise require significant human effort or expertise.

For example, an agentic system could handle customer service inquiries, manage social media presence, or even conduct market research, with some babysitting of course. These agents won't be completely autonomous, they will need tending, like a little robot garden, kinda cute!

 By enabling AI to make decisions and take actions autonomously, small organizations can potentially increase efficiency, reduce costs, and free up valuable time for employees to focus on more strategic initiatives. The integration of agentic AI with real-world tools further enhances this capability, allowing small businesses to leverage AI for specific industry-related tasks or operations.

4 Agentic AI use cases for small businesses

Individual efficiency

Automated Research and Summarization: An individual could use an agentic AI to conduct comprehensive research on a specific topic, collect data from various sources, and generate a detailed summary report, saving hours of manual searching and reading. For things like robust training guides or in-depth projects, it can save a massive amount of time and reduce errors.

Personalized Task Management: An agentic AI could manage an individual's daily tasks, prioritizing them based on deadlines and importance, scheduling reminders, and even automating routine tasks like email responses or calendar management. For example, Brian keeps missing meetings because he has like 5 calendars, so he has an agent send him a daily agenda of all meetings to make sure he doesn't miss anything!

Small organization improvement

Automated customer support: A small business could deploy an agentic AI to handle routine customer inquiries, troubleshoot common issues, and escalate complex problems to human support, improving response times and customer satisfaction. This is common already with web chatbots, but agents can also be behind the scenes herding critical customer issues to the right place or person. 

Marketing campaign optimization: A small marketing team could utilize an agentic AI to manage and optimize marketing campaigns across various channels, analyzing data, adjusting strategies, and generating reports on performance, freeing up the team to focus on creative and strategic planning. This should be used with caution for sure, but an agent could have direct access to your core branding and content documentation. Actually, we are building something just like that here at Harrier! 

Agentic AI resources (downloadable resource) 

Access this resource in Gsheets here. Full Link for the Google Sheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Bv8DL6gn6I2xBQkShqwXnwRBrs03wBACH1_ZbMxjxok/edit?usp=sharing

You didn't think we'd write only about business leaving out the potential "fun," did you?  

Good! because we sometimes just cannot help ourselves.  So, enjoy laughs with this AI Agent ChatGPT generated spin-off "humor."

ChatGPT says, Sometimes the best way to understand complex tech is to laugh at it.

So, [ChatGPT] "imagined " what happens when a well-meaning Agentic AI goes a bit off-script—think retro spy antics, Roombas with egos, and marketing mayhem in a world run by overly helpful bots.

The comic below pokes fun at the same quirks we sometimes see in real AI tools—including their occasional inability to, say, generate a comic panel that isn’t slightly cropped at the top [and with "typos"]. Hey, even the smartest agents have blind spots.

Enjoy the chaos (and the mayonnaise)!

The following is Kristen's Prompt that led to the above comic creation. (Not my best prompting, but I was hoping that providing Brian's brilliant article would take care of any shortcomings in my prompting)

Kristen said: Take this article and make a light-hearted companion comic that is based on the old time sitcom "Get smart" {pasted article}.

ChatGPT said: Here's a light-hearted comic concept inspired by the old-time sitcom Get Smart, using the article’s ideas about Agentic AI. The comic features two main characters styled after Maxwell Smart (now called Agent AI-86) and his competent partner Agent 99.9, working for a fictional agency called C.O.G.I.T.O. (Clever Organization Generating Intelligent Task Operations). It’s a 6-panel comic strip with slapstick humor, retro spy vibes, and a modern AI twist.