ALL about AI agent, What is this?

AI is increasingly being used as an assistant in our daily lives. It’s great to have the information I need at my fingertips, but putting it into action on my behalf has been a challenge. But once I understood the AI agent and used it, everything was a click away.

What is an AI agent?

In the past, we used to find the information we needed through keywords on Google’s search engine, but now we use AI chatbots to get the information we want right out of the box.

However, while the AI chatbot made it easy for me to find information, when I needed to do something with the information I found, I had to do it myself, not the AI. I’ll talk about an example of this below.

So I think what I mean by an AI agent is something that takes action on my behalf directly on the information that we find through AI.

Differences between AI chatbots and AI agents

Airline tickets, doctor’s appointments

We’ve already mentioned what an AI agent is, but you may not be familiar with it, so let’s give you an example.

With an AI chatbot, I can instantly get information like the location, hours, and phone number of a hospital near where I live. However, once I have that information, I still need to take action to make an appointment.

You can tell the AI chatbot where you want to travel from and to, and ask it to book tickets for you, and get information about dates, prices, and more.

However, it’s still no different than a doctor’s appointment in that you’re the one taking the action to book the ticket.

However, AI agents differ from AI chatbots in that they can add direct actions to the information they discover through AI.

This means that AI agents can also handle doctor’s appointments and airline tickets directly.

AI agents can leverage n8n

To understand what I mean by an AI agent, I’d like to introduce you to a website called n8n, because I think you’ll understand it better if you use it yourself.

You can use it for free for one month with a one-month trial, and it will automatically stop working after one month without you having to cancel.

Sign up for a trial, log in, and you’re ready to start working with AI agents.

Send an email via chat

First, let’s do something very simple that can utilize AI agents.

Let’s do something where you can just type something in the chat, run it, and it will email you what you wrote in the email settings.

When you log in to the n8n website, you should see a Dashview like the one above. By pressing the CREATE WORKFLOW button in the top right corner, we can get to the space where we can work.

The window above is the workflow for the AI Agent. To send an email by simply pressing Enter in a chat, we’ll start by pressing the + button in the center of the screen.

This will bring up a menu window where you can select a signal (trigger). We need to make the chat window our trigger, so select the On chat message menu.

So in the workflow task pane, you’ll see a chat icon, which we call a node.

Going forward, we’re going to bring up a bunch of these nodes for the tasks we want to do, and we’re going to connect them together to do what we want to do.

And let’s bring up the AI Agent node by pressing the + next to the Chat node or the + in the top right of the screen above.

To do this, press the + button, select the AI menu, and then select an AI agent.

So you should see this AI agent settings screen. To get to the workflow window for the first time, click once outside of the settings screen.

You should now see the AI Agent node. To give the AI Agent a task, we need a Chat Model (the brain).

Tap the + button associated with the Chat Model and select OpenAI Chat Model.

If this is your first time, you’ll see a different screen than the one above. In the Credential to connect with section, you’ll see Free credential in green, click it.

By the way, Credential means authenticating yourself and normally you have to pay for it, but since we have a free trial, you can use it for free for a month.

And in the Model part below that, you’ll want to choose the gpt-4o-mini model, which is the most straightforward.

You should see another node. This confirms the OpenAI chat model we selected a moment ago. Each time we do this, we’re adding something, which means we’re on the right track.

To explain the above action, you signal that you want to chat, and the AI agent recognizes the action and produces some result.

I can see the Chat and AI Agent nodes, but not the Results node. Do you remember what result we were trying to achieve?

The answer is to send an email. On the + button to the right of the AI Agent node, we need to enter the result we want.

Search for mail, select the Gmail menu, and click the Send a message detail menu.

In the Credential to connect with section, select the + create new credential section and then select your Google account, and you can choose as shown above. You can enter the information as below.

Now you have one task completed. The simple way to describe the above task is that you give a signal to the chat window and the AI agent (brain: OpenAI chat model) sends an email.

It’s a good idea to save your work in advance via the Save button above.

So let’s get to work, we’re going to signal the chat window, and if you look in the bottom left corner, you’ll see the chat window.

You can write anything in there, hit enter, and that’s the signal to trigger the AI agent, and it will send you an email.

The content of the chat window doesn’t go to email, the content you put in your email settings goes to email.

How to use AI agents

You can send the same email to multiple people. You can do this by utilizing an excel file with names and email addresses.

You can also use the chat to get things like the Quote of the Day emailed to you.

You can also utilize other website APIs to have the highlights of this news emailed to you. Even better, you can schedule a task to receive that summary at a set date and time.

Finalize

Today, we’ve created an AI agent semantics and a simple send email via chat action on the n8n website.

In this way, AI agents can help you accomplish a variety of tasks with much less effort and more results.

In fact, the above method was actually taught to me by the famous YouTuber Nami of the “Mom I’ll Teach You” channel, who explained what an AI agent is and how to use it.

I had a lot of fun watching the video and trying out the AI agent myself. I actually asked ChatGPT (the free version) to send me one investment-related quote every day at a set time, but it didn’t work.

I had a thirst for that kind of work, and the AI agent made it easy for me to get it in my email every day, at a time of my choosing.

Recently, as the importance of AI has been rising, I’ve been reading books and tutorials on AI, and I realized that there is an AI utilization test in Korea, although it is a private test.

Because just as smartphones have changed our lives considerably, AI will change our lives even more in the future. Shouldn’t we be prepared?