The Hidden Cost of AI Agents No One Talks About
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
I met a customer in New York City a couple of weeks ago. He says, my boss tells me he needs agents and I just keep building make workflow automations and I tell them there are agents and he's very happy. So by empowering that AI agent that has a role and understanding what it should do and then giving it the right tools and very precisely focused on giving it success. scalpels, not sledgehammers. We learned more about the capabilities of generative AI. We learned AI can actually reason, and that's an interesting thought unto itself. And if AI can reason, it means it's not just part of the workflow, but it's actually driving the workflow. And ironically, the more you throw at it, the less successful it is.
They have people who, for whatever reasons in the past, have shown themselves not capable of successfully taking care of a pet. So the do not adopt list, it's name a person, maybe an address, phone number. The business process is making sure that a person that comes in is not on that do not adopt list. Fuzzy matching is like a hard software problem to solve normally. Like, is this is Tom Thomas and Thomas Tom? Like, are these the same person? It's a baseline expectation when you come to work now.
How do AI agents differ from traditional automation workflows?
So imagine building hundreds of automation workflows across your company, sales, marketing, customer service, and you're scared to change anything because you don't know what you might break. That's the reality for a lot of companies today with AI and automation. And today we're going to talk to Make about how to solve this exact problem. Welcome, humans, to the latest episode of The Neuron Podcast. I'm Corey Knowles, editor of The Neuron, joined as always by our daily writer, Grant Harvey. How are you, Grant?
Doing good, Corey. Doing great, actually. Really excited about this one.
Nice, nice. Well, today we're going to talk with Darren Patterson, VP of Market Strategy at Make. the automation platform used by about 250,000 organizations worldwide. Mick just launched two awesome new products, AI agents that can make autonomous decisions in your workflows and make Grid the world's first real-time visual map of your entire automation landscape.
And Darren has a fascinating take that goes against what everyone's saying right now. While the industry is screaming AI agents everywhere, he's arguing that companies need to get their automation house in order first, or they're setting themselves up for failure.
What role does automation play in business processes?
Darren, welcome to The Neuron. Great to have you.
Corey and Grant, it's great to be with you. I'm actually a big fan of your newsletter and read it every day before I get started. Oh, that's awesome. Thank you. I really appreciate that.
So, Darren, I guess our first question is something Corey and I talked a bit about is we usually tell people that there's a lot of companies that are, you know, marketing AI agents, let's say, but they're actually just, you know, agentic or automation workflows. Both are cool. But for an AI to be an agent, it needs to reason and act on a user's behalf. So which one is make building?
All of the above. Actually, I describe it as either we were prescient or quite lucky, but we've been doing automation for some 10 years now. And of course, the world of automation has changed significantly in the last few years, as you guys would certainly know. And that fateful day in November, I think it was 2022, when ChatGPT became known to the masses,
How can businesses avoid automation sprawl?
That was a moment in time that we saw people begin to experiment with, how do I actually incorporate AI into my business processes? And so Make was actually supremely suited to be able to take advantage of that trend and enable you to experiment very quickly with incorporating it into your business process. But of course, as we learn more about the capabilities of generative AI, we learned AI can actually reason. And that's an interesting thought unto itself. And if AI can reason, it means it's not just part of the workflow, but it's actually driving the workflow. So we actually commonly describe automation among a spectrum.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–1:09
2
How do AI agents differ from traditional automation workflows?
1:09–2:21
3
What role does automation play in business processes?
2:21–3:27
4
How can businesses avoid automation sprawl?
3:27–4:50
5
What is the significance of Model Context Protocol (MCP)?
4:50–5:37
6
How can businesses scale AI safely within their operations?
5:37–7:14
7
What are some real-world examples of using AI agents?
7:14–8:41
8
How can organizations prepare for future automation challenges?
8:41–1:00:37
Speakers
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