You have probably heard a lot about artificial intelligence, ChatGPT and AI agents. But what exactly is an AI agent — and more importantly, could one actually help your business?
The simplest way to think about an AI agent is as a digital assistant designed to carry out particular tasks for your business.
Rather than simply asking AI a question and receiving an answer, an AI agent can be designed around a process. It can receive information, understand what needs to happen next, carry out certain actions and know when it’s time for a person to become involved.
What could an AI agent actually do?
Every business is different, but there are plenty of everyday tasks where AI could potentially help.
An AI agent might help you:
- Respond to initial customer enquiries
- Ask customers for the information you need
- Identify what a potential customer is looking for
- Answer frequently asked questions
- Organise and categorise enquiries
- Create follow-up tasks
- Assist with appointment or meeting requests
- Help prepare marketing content
- Re-engage previous enquiries
- Provide useful information to your team
The objective isn’t to introduce AI simply because everyone is talking about it. It’s to identify the places where it could genuinely save time or improve the way your business works.
AI doesn’t have to replace people
This is particularly important.
Good automation shouldn’t mean removing people from your business altogether.
There will always be situations where experience, judgement, empathy or a personal conversation matters. An effective AI workflow should recognise where automation is useful — and where a person needs to take over.
For example, an AI agent might handle the initial stages of an enquiry, collect the relevant information and identify what the customer needs. It could then pass that enquiry to the right person at the appropriate point.
The AI does the repetitive work. Your team handles the conversations that need a human touch.
Start with the business, not the technology
At WITH SASHA, we believe the first question shouldn’t be:
“Where can we put AI?”
It should be:
“How does your business work, and where could AI genuinely help?”
That means looking at the tasks you perform every day, where time is being lost, where enquiries get delayed and which repetitive processes could potentially be handled differently.
Only then does it make sense to explore the technology.
We’re testing it on ourselves first
WITH SASHA is currently developing its own approach to AI agents and automated business workflows.
And we’re doing something we think is important: testing it on our own business first.
We use our own business as a real-world environment for testing our AI workflow approach. This gives us the opportunity to learn, refine and understand what works before recommending similar solutions to customers.
We don’t believe a customer’s business should be the testing ground for an unproven process.
Could AI help your business?
Perhaps.
And that’s actually the point.
Not every business needs an elaborate AI system. Sometimes one carefully chosen automation that saves a few hours every week could be far more valuable.
The opportunity is to understand what’s possible, identify where it makes commercial sense and build from there.
AI doesn’t need to make your business more complicated. Done properly, it should make business simpler.
That’s what we’re exploring at WITH SASHA.