How to build AI agents [within 5 minutes]

AI agents can lead to explosive business growth. They can help you automate tasks, simplify workflows, boost sales, and enhance customer experience without needing a big team.

AI agents can become a USD 47.1 billion market by 2030. Major companies like Google, Microsoft, and Salesforce are already investing in this powerful technology. If you want to stay ahead of the curve, you should use AI agents too.

The good news? Building an AI agent doesn’t have to be costly and time-consuming. With no-code platforms, creating an AI agent is easier than ever. This post will help you build a custom AI agent for your business in minutes without burning your money.

Why build AI agents?

AI agents work for you 24/7 and help you effortlessly scale your business. However, before building an AI agent, identify why you need it in the first place. What problem do you want it to solve? Do you want to attract more sales opportunities, provide personalized customer support, or manage inventory?

Here are some business use cases:

Lead generation: Engage website visitors, qualify them, and collect their information.
Inbound sales: Book sales meetings, follow up with prospects, and increase conversions.
Human resources: Screen resumes, schedule interviews, and onboard new hires.
Data analytics: Collect and analyze data to identify trends and insights.
Customer support: Resolve customer queries and escalate complex issues to human agents.
Shopping assistant: Recommend products based on the buyer’s needs and preferences.
Email management: Sort, prioritize, organize, and reply to emails.

Clearly defining the purpose will help you make better decisions in every step of developing the agent.

What’s the best platform to build AI agents?

You can create AI agents primarily in three ways:

Coding from scratch: Gives you complete control but requires a development team and significant time.
Using low-code frameworks: Simplifies the process with pre-built templates but still requires time and coding.
Using no-code platforms: Lets you easily create custom AI agents with natural language prompts or drag-and-drop interfaces.

You can choose the way that best suits your business needs. However, if you want to save time, money, and effort, you should go with the third option.

When selecting a no-code AI agent builder, make sure it:

Has a user-friendly interface that simplifies training and managing agents.
Lets you customize the agent’s skills, behavior, and appearance.
Connects with your website, CRM, social media, or email systems.
Can handle growing needs without lowering the quality of work.
Provides an intuitive dashboard to track agent performance.
Is compliant with security guidelines.

Read this post to explore some of the best no-code AI agent builders for your business.

How to build AI agents for beginners

To simplify things, we’ll discuss how to build an AI sales agent using advanced, no-code platforms like Chatsimple. Here are seven steps for the same:

1. Train the agent

The first thing you’ve to do is integrate the agent with a high-quality knowledge base so that it can respond properly. Since the performance of an AI agent largely depends on its training, make sure the knowledge base is accurate, complete, and updated.

For example, if you’re building an employee onboarding agent, the knowledge base will contain everything about company policies, procedures, culture, relevant software, etc.

Similarly, if you’re building an AI sales agent, the knowledge base will contain details about your products and services, like descriptions, features, benefits, use cases, pricing, policies, etc.

Chatsimple helps you easily integrate your agent with the knowledge base. Just log in, go to the Training Materials tab, and add your website URL, documents, or simple text. The agent will scan all the stored information and use it to answer questions and complete tasks.

2. Set goals for the agent

An AI agent can have multiple use cases. Setting goals lets you define what specific actions you want the agent to take.

For example, an AI agent for social media management can chat with followers, schedule posts, and reply to comments. Defining clear goals allows the agent to focus on tasks that matter most.

Similarly, an AI sales agent can collect leads, book sales meetings, direct website visitors to a page, or ask visitors to watch a demo video. Chatsimple lets you easily set multiple goals for the agent. You can go to the Business Goals tab, select goals, and add the condition and action for each goal.

3. Teach it skills

Here, you help the agent perform its tasks and achieve the goals you’ve set. For example, you need to teach an AI report generation agent how to collect data, generate reports, and send them via email. Similarly, for an AI HR agent, you need to tell it how to sort resumes, schedule interviews, and answer employee questions.

With Chatsimple, teaching your AI agent is simple. You can add skills like voice support, lead qualification, updating your CRM, providing conversation summaries, etc. For example, if you want your AI agent to qualify leads, you can go to the Qualify Leads tab and add the necessary questions. The agent will ask these questions naturally during conversations to generate qualified leads. You can also set conditions to trigger questions only when a user brings up certain topics.

4. Align it with your brand

Make sure your AI agent appears and behaves like a part of your brand. This will enhance familiarity and brand recognition. That’s why Chatsimple provides you extensive customization options to make your AI sales agent consistent with your brand.

You can change the agent’s name, color, icon, welcome message, and conversation starters on the Appearance tab.
You can customize how the agent speaks and engages visitors on the Voice AI tab.
You can define the agent’s role and personality (professional, funny, positive, etc.) on the Advanced tab.

5. Test and improve

Testing how the AI agent performs in real-world scenarios helps you identify mistakes and fix them before deploying it.

Go to the Try My AI tab and ask the agent tricky questions to see how it responds. Make sure the agent takes the appropriate actions to achieve the defined goals. If the agent makes any errors, you can:

Update the training materials.
Choose an advanced AI model.
Improve responses on the Conversations tab.
Write effective prompts on the Advanced tab.

6. Integrate and deploy

Now that your AI agent is ready, you can connect it with your website, app, CRM, email, or social media to make it live for users.

You can easily deploy Chatsimple’s AI sales agent to your website by adding a code snippet to your website’s HTML file. You can connect it to CRM tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Zoho, and Pipedrive with a few clicks. You can also add the agent to your messaging platforms like Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Test the integrations to make sure everything works.

7. Analyze its performance

Once you deploy your AI agent, you need to regularly track its performance to make sure it follows the rules and achieves its goals. This helps you improve the agent and make it more effective over time.

Chatsimple provides a useful dashboard to track the number of conversations, leads collected, and links clicked. You can go to the Conversations tab to access all the agent conversations, see the sources of agent responses, and improve each response. You can also easily update the knowledge base to keep the agent accurate and helpful.