How Close Are We to Smarter, Faster, Better Business with AI Agents?

Let’s not bury the lead.  AI agents are quickly developing into a powerful set of tools that can transform business operations, regardless of the industry.  Their ability to adapt, be deployed with little training, work together, and autonomously solve problems is nothing short of amazing.  In fact, much of the “sci-fi AI” that was shown in movies over the last ten years has done a lot to illustrate the potential of AI agents working together.  And with the evolution of the agents themselves, using more and more sophisticated architectures and algorithms, this potential will only increase.

There is a growing economy of AI agent providers, which means that the direct cost of these systems are already trending to a very reasonable level.  While they aren’t completely plug-and-play just yet, there is already a gentle learning curve that allows even non-programmers to use AI agents to accomplish small, repetitive tasks with positive results.  Building up new agents can be done by companies who use them, or could be done by specialty companies who can then license or sell the agents to customer businesses.  Given the limited tasks that can be performed by a single agent, even the Return on Investment calculation is rather direct, allowing businesses to calculate just how much money they can save, or revenue they can generate, by deploying an agent for a given task.

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class="wp-block-heading">So why the warning about a steep price?

The actual cost may be straightforward for utilizing AI agents.  However, there are other prices to pay when bringing on an agent, and some are both difficult to quantify and even difficult to fully appreciate.  Let’s dive into what an AI agent is, how it can help your business, and what some of the potential issues are that could make the total price steeper than you think.  Thankfully, we can also look at some of the key ways to prevent these issues to ensure that deploying AI agents can be truly beneficial.

The Job of An AI Agent

Before looking at the pros and cons of AI agents, we need to quickly understand what they are.  An AI agent is essentially a small chunk of software that is self contained to complete a specific task.  That definition on its own describes most software programs, but an agent is special in a few ways.  First, it is developed to tackle a specific problem and has been trained using reference data that allows it to make informed decisions.  It employs AI algorithms to take in new information, reason it out, and act on it.  Because it uses AI for this, it can also begin to adapt and learn as it takes in new information, especially when there is a feedback loop helping it understand what it did well.  AI agents are more flexible than standard software because they can more clearly understand natural language and imprecise commands.  This means that they can use the web, system data, and even other agents as inputs.  This can happen even if the syntax isn’t perfect, because the foundational AI can often interpret data inputs significantly better than straightforward software.  

AI agents can search the internet (or other systems) for specific information, they can analyze patterns of data and make predictions, they can optimize systems, and they can make recommendations for just about anything if the input data allows them to analyze and suggest the best options.  As mentioned above, they can also interact with other agents, use them to solve problems they aren’t well suited for, and they have the potential to even buy and sell these skills to other agents using money allotted to them by the owner of the agent.  

At the end of the day, you can think about these agents as simplified droids or synthetic people, with limited context of the larger world, but a specialty mindset for the problem they were created to solve.  So again, where does this high “price” come into play?  Two areas:  data, and value.  

Imagine your team of synthetic beings using your company’s data to move around the internet, tackle problems, and give you answers.  This is well and good, but agents can easily take the data needed to learn and pass it on, intentionally or not, to agents outside your organization.  Likewise, they can obtain data that shouldn’t belong to you in a way that can be legally dubious at best.  In addition to the data, if real money is allotted for an agent to spend, that money could be spent very quickly on something that does not end up adding value if the agent isn’t completely on target with what they are trying to solve.  Both of these issues, like the agents themselves, are scalable, but that scale can go negative very quickly.

Web3 Is Both Gateway and Shield

AI agents on their own have promise, but unfortunately they can also act like AI often does in movies:  they can misunderstand the assignment and very efficiently turn the situation into a disaster.  Two key elements to this are the data that needs to be protected, and the commerce effects where AI agents actually spend your money.  Web3 is uniquely suited for both problems, it turns out, and that is why some of the strongest AI agent companies are focused in the decentralized domain.

This match between AI agents and Web3 as its cornerstone is gaining ground.  A key platform launchpad for innovative Web3 projects, Calyx, has announced the TGE for an enterprise-focused AI agent platform called Intellex.  This gives those parties interested in a direct stake the opportunity to jump in, and given the core value of Intellex, the scalable potential for AI agents in more traditional enterprises is impressive.  The fact that the platform will be leveraging Web3 creates a strong interest in no less than three key areas:  AI, Web3, and business innovation.

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So how does Web3 solve our data and money issues?  In terms of data, Web3 is built to encapsulate a chunk of data, place it on-chain to ensure it is unchanged, encrypt it so it remains private, and ensure ownership to one and only one wallet address.  By doing this, these many bite-sized chunks of data that are used in many ways as the fuel of AI agents can be better protected, allowing the agents to still use them to the full extent without compromising their integrity or giving unauthorized parties access.  With smart contracts and other functions, AI agents from across the globe representing vastly different organizations can interact in a trustless manner, using the foundational architecture of the blockchain to moderate and facilitate transactions.  As the agents on both sides have a truly neutral third party, an element of safety is created.  Agents can interact using tokens instead of standard currency, further easing the challenge of borderless interactions.  In summary, Web3 feels like it was designed specifically for AI agents, offering security for data, an avenue for currency transactions, and a referee for transactions, and all of it done without a centralized organization creating costly overhead or creating a fallible security risk.

We look forward to seeing the rise of AI agents across enterprises, especially those that utilize the very best Web3 has to offer.