Running a small business is often chaotic. You might find yourself juggling many roles and responsibilities. Even with a solid team, there can be considerable pressure to deliver results and meet customer expectations. It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. The good news is that artificial intelligence can help you lighten the load by automating time-consuming tasks and improving overall operational efficiency. In this article, we’ll discuss the best AI agents to help you accomplish your goals and improve productivity so you can scale your business without burning out.
AI Acquisition’s AI operating system can help you find the best AI agents to streamline your business. This valuable tool makes it easy to identify, implement, and integrate AI agents to automate tasks and boost productivity.
When most of us think about AI, we might immediately think of generative AI bots like ChatGPT. While that’s undoubtedly an exciting use of the strides made in artificial intelligence technology, AI can do so much more. Enter AI agents. In short, an AI agent is an AI tool that automates and completes routine tasks for you.
Businesses can deploy AI agents to take repetitive tasks off employees' plates, freeing up time for the sort of deep work and decision-making that humans excel at. AI agents offer new capabilities that can transform how organizations operate, providing significant benefits across various industries. These AI agents can:
Other agents streamline hiring, automate marketing, and even transcribe and organize meetings. That doesn’t mean robots are taking our jobs—instead, AI agents can make us more productive by simplifying complex tasks without human intervention. Developers are building AI agents at a rapid pace, and there are now multiple AI agents to choose from, covering a range of functions. So, how do you choose the right ones?
Technologies such as machine learning, large language models, natural language processing, computer vision, and reinforcement learning enable AI agents to perform their designated functions.
AI agents utilize various AI models to perform tasks effectively, enhancing their autonomy and capabilities. AI agents work in a three-part cycle:
The difference between these types of AI agents and an AI tool like ChatGPT is that AI agents can perform tasks autonomously, or at least semi-autonomously. While ChatGPT requires manual input from a human user to deliver results, AI agents can find what they need and run tasks independently. No human intervention is necessary once it’s up and running.
For business operations, AI agents autonomously complete their tasks, allowing human employees to focus on other work. An AI agent could, for example, automatically process an invoice, execute stock market trades, or screen resumes. Essentially, they’re the ultimate AI assistant.
The best, specialized AI agents:
Tired of taking meeting notes? Meet Fellow, the AI meeting assistant that ensures you’ll never have to retake notes. Fellow joins virtual meetings on Google Meet, Zoom, or Microsoft Teams and automatically records, transcribes, and summarizes discussions. The tool notes action items and decisions made.
Fellow uses natural language processing to distill complex discussions into succinct meeting notes that are easily shareable. Fellow even has customizable permissions. Through prompts like “write a follow up email” or “write a proposal document,” Ask Fellow Copilot — Fellow’s chatbot functionality — can write any documentation based on the meeting transcript.
Fellow becomes like your personal executive assistant. It takes notes and then automatically sends a meeting recap with key decisions and discussion points—all of which used to require manual entry. Tasks that Fellow automates:
Ask Fellow Copilot chatbot to write documents with information from the meeting transcript.
For sales professionals, prospecting can be a real slog, but AI agents can help. HubSpot’s Breeze is an all-in-one AI-powered platform designed for customer-facing teams, featuring AI Breeze Agents. In particular, we want to highlight Breeze’s Prospecting Agent. It can identify prospects from your HubSpot customer data and automate outreach, saving you time.
The implementation of AI agents, such as HubSpot Breeze, can drive business growth by increasing productivity and creating significant value for sales teams. Tasks that Breeze automates with AI agents:
Glean is an enterprise search and knowledge management tool that adds the power of AI to all of your company’s internal documentation. In addition to making information easy to find, you can use Glean to build custom generative AI apps and agents to carry out tasks. It also requires no code, and agents can simply be built with natural language processing.
The integration of AI agents, such as Glean, can transform operational processes, enabling organizations to unlock new business models. Tasks that Glean automates with AI agents:
Brain is ClickUp’s AI productivity assistant. The part we want to highlight is the AI Project Manager, which helps create no-code automations of the project management workflow, such as:
AI agents, such as ClickUp Brain, collaborate with various AI models to accomplish tasks effectively in project management.
Tasks that ClickUp Brain automates with AI agents:
Intercom’s customer service agent, known as Fin, provides human-level support to customers by utilizing the company’s:
Fin can then automatically take action on behalf of customers, keeping your human agents free for more complex tickets. This balance between AI autonomy and the need for minimal human oversight ensures that while Fin handles routine inquiries efficiently, human agents are available for more complex issues.
Hightouch is a composable customer data platform that helps marketers personalize their messages and refine targeting. When it comes to intelligent agents, Hightouch offers AI-driven decision-making, which utilizes experimentation and machine learning to determine the most effective way to engage individual customers automatically.
The development and performance of AI systems, such as Hightouch, in marketing applications play a crucial role in enhancing customer engagement and targeting. Tasks that Hightouch automates with AI agents:
Developers know AI helps when they're stuck on code, but it can now act as an independent developer. Devin can write and test code like a reliable teammate. Still, organizations face challenges adopting AI agent technology in software development, emphasizing the importance of building trust among users and managing changes within the company.
Devin turns natural language requests into action and continuously learns from itself. Tasks that Devin automates with AI agents:
Paradox is an AI assistant for the entire hiring process. It automates “the boring stuff” so HR professionals can spend more time interacting with people instead of reviewing resumes. It helps right from applicant screening to interview preparation and creating offers. Tasks that Paradox automates with AI agents:
Intuit Assist is an AI financial assistant created by the company behind QuickBooks. It integrates with Intuit’s suite of tools to automate repetitive financial tasks, such as expense categorization and invoice reminders.
Here, we’re focusing on the QuickBooks integration. AI agents, such as Intuit Assist, access various internal and external systems to complete financial tasks efficiently and make informed decisions. Tasks that Intuit Assist automates with AI agents:
Tableau, from Salesforce, has introduced a powerful AI agent to accelerate data-driven decision-making. Tableau Agent uses:
Tasks that Tableau Agent automates with AI agents:
The above autonomous agents are ready to perform specific tasks out of the box. But if you have the know-how, you can build custom AI agents from scratch. AutoGPT enables you to create and maintain your digital assistants in operation. With AutoGPT, you can create various agent types, each with diverse capabilities and roles, tailored to different environments and tasks.
It’s up to you! AutoGPT can execute the multi-step tasks you assign.
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Google’s Gemini-powered agents are already embedded across various industries—from fast-food drive-thrus to finance and automotive UX. Built on DeepMind’s cutting-edge Gemini models and deployed through Google Cloud, these agents are highly adaptable and deeply integrated into enterprise workflows.
Gemini agents are designed to scale intelligence across roles, whether:
Amelia started as IPsoft back in the dot-com era and has since evolved into a sophisticated enterprise AI agent platform—customizable, multilingual, and deeply integrated into sectors like:
In 2024, SoundHound acquired Amelia for $80 million, betting on the growing demand for AI voice and agentic systems across industries.
The deal expanded SoundHound’s reach into heavily regulated sectors and bundled Amelia’s advanced agent tech into its broader portfolio of enterprise voice solutions. With roughly 200 enterprise clients between them and a projected $150 million in revenue for 2025, the combined company is positioning itself as a serious contender in the AI agent race.
IBM’s watsonx Orchestrate is a no-code platform for building AI agents that automate routine business tasks at scale. Designed for enterprise teams, it enables users to quickly spin up custom agents that seamlessly integrate into existing workflows—from HR and procurement to sales and operations—with minimal setup and configuration.
The platform offers prebuilt tools for everything from candidate scheduling to approval routing, all integrated under a unified interface. According to IBM, agents built with Orchestrate resolve 94% of requests automatically, speed up onboarding by 25%, and reduce time spent on reporting by up to 88%.
Anthropic’s Claude Agents are designed for high-trust enterprise environments, with a focus on:
Powered by Claude Opus 4, the company’s most advanced model, these agents are built to:
The agents excel at multi-turn reasoning and structured decision-making, with a heavy emphasis on brand safety, jailbreak resistance, and output control.
North is Cohere’s all-in-one AI agent platform designed to replace digital busywork with intelligent automation. Built around its proprietary Command LLM, North combines powerful reasoning with industry-specific workflows for sectors like:
Companies like Oracle, SAP SE, Salesforce, and the Royal Bank of Canada are already deploying North’s agents to handle everything from document generation and data retrieval to decision support and customer engagement. It features out-of-the-box agents or customizable builds that connect to enterprise systems in just a few clicks.
Botpress is an AI agent platform built for teams that want to structure agent behavior without managing code-heavy logic. You design how the agent works using flows, a visual editor where each node handles a focused task with its:
Instead of writing chained prompts or logic trees, you work with scoped, modular pieces that reflect real workflows. This modularity is especially useful when you want reliable automation across support, onboarding, or internal systems, with clear logic and clean permissions baked in. Botpress comes with built-in integrations so your agent can take tangible actions out of the box for tools like:
CrewAI is an open-source framework for multi-agent systems, enabling AI agents to collaborate on tasks through defined roles and shared goals. It is designed for scenarios requiring intelligent teamwork among agents. What makes CrewAI appealing is its ease of getting started.
From there, the agents discuss, run tasks, and complete goals without needing to create orchestration logic from scratch. For simple multi-agent use cases, it gets a surprising amount done with minimal setup. But that simplicity cuts both ways. Once your workflows become more complex—if agents need to adapt mid-task or coordinate across conditional steps—the built-in abstractions can feel limiting.
The Microsoft Semantic Kernel is an open-source AI orchestration framework that enables developers to embed AI capabilities into existing applications. Its focus on modularity, memory, and goal planning makes it well-suited for building robust AI agents that can operate within enterprise environments.
At its core, Semantic Kernel is about planning and execution. You define “skills”, which can be either native functions or LLM-backed prompts, and combine them into semantic plans that guide the agent’s behavior. The framework:
That said, it’s still a developer-first tool: there’s little visual scaffolding, and much of the orchestration requires deliberate design.
Rasa is an open-source framework that blends natural language understanding with dialogue management to power context-aware chatbots and voice assistants. You assemble NLU pipelines from interchangeable components, then define dialogue policies that maintain context across multiple turns.
This approach enables you to swap in new intent classifiers or entity extractors as your domain evolves, without requiring the rewriting of other system components. Because Rasa runs on your infrastructure, you keep complete control over data privacy and scaling.
Founded in 2021, Relay is a clean and simple AI agent builder designed to help automate different workflows in your agency, firm, or freelance business. It’s very similar to Gumloop in terms of its visual appeal and ease of use. There are also numerous app integrations built in, making it easy to connect with other tools you may already be using or paying for.
They also have an inspiration gallery so you can see examples of different workflow automations and intelligent agents you can create. For example, you can make an AI Discord bot with DeepSeek. Or, you can create an AI agent that enriches your CRM contacts with their personal LinkedIn information.
It’s a great tool if you run an agency and manage a large number of leads and contacts. It’s also great for customer success teams if they want to automate some of their support tickets.
Founded in 2021, HockeyStack is an AI agent builder designed for enterprise marketing teams. Initially, the company was created for B2B revenue operations, but it looks like they’ve made a pivot into the AI agent space.
HockeyStack is definitely on the premium side compared to the tools we’ve gone over so far. It’s not a self-serve tool (as of the time of writing). It’s primarily used by larger enterprises with substantial budgets.
But HockeyStack is more than just an AI agent software. The platform also integrates with your data to provide you with internal insights powered by AI. It also features analytics and attribution data, allowing you to measure multi-touch attribution. It’s a powerful tool, and it makes sense why they went upmarket and focused on larger enterprises.
I recommend booking a demo if you work at a large company and hold an executive or director-level position.
Founded in 2022, Stack AI is a no-code platform designed to help you deploy automated workflows and AI apps (aka agents). Similar to HockeyStack, it was initially intended for larger enterprises rather than small businesses. Nevertheless, that’s what they advertise on their site. The pricing structure suggests otherwise, so it feels more like a mid-market SaaS tool.
Similar to Gumloop, Stack AI also features an extensive library of templates that you can select from. They also have some impressive customers across various industries, including healthcare, finance, and education. If you’re also in those spaces, this tool is worth considering.
AI Acquisition helps professionals and business owners start and scale AI-driven businesses using existing AI tools, including our proprietary AI Clients operating system. By leveraging current AI technology, you can avoid starting from scratch, which saves time and money. You don’t need a technical background, and you won’t have to work what feels like another 9-5 job to make money with AI. That’s because AI does a lot of the heavy lifting for you.
Check out my free training to see how I used this exact system to go from a burned-out corporate director to making $500,000 per month in under two years. You can also book an AI strategy call with one of our consultants to see how you could use your existing skills and experience to start a successful AI business.
You can start an AI business even if you are broke. You do not need to invest thousands of dollars to get started. AI Acquisition teaches you how to use existing tools to get your business off the ground. Once you start landing clients and making money, you can reinvest your profits to grow your business.
Get the exact playbook we used to build our own AI-powered agency. Inside, you'll discover the strategies, tools, and workflows that helped us systemize growth.
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