Imagine someone sat beside you at your desk, with their own computer. Your very own agent, co-worker, personal assistant, whatever you want to call them.
You can ask them questions and talk things through, but you can also ask them to do work for you. They can look things up on websites, see your email and calendar, use your apps, and get on with the tasks you give them. If they’ve got a question or need access to something, they’ll ask you.
Now imagine that person is the smartest person you know, they know almost everything about anything. They’re always chirpy, available 24/7 and never tire of your requests, however many times you change your mind. You explain what you want done, and they work out how to do it.
An AI agent works along similar lines, getting work done for you with very little fuss.
One less job to do
At the start of every school term, my daughter’s school publishes a PDF full of dates for the calendar. I used to go through it and put each event into our shared family Google Calendar, one by one. It was a ten-minute job I carried out dutifully, if reluctantly.
At the start of the last summer term (April 2026), though, I just gave ChatGPT the PDF and asked it to put the dates into our joint calendar. With access to my Google Calendar, it read the document and added the events flawlessly, in less than a minute.
Getting the slides built
Then there are presentations. I used to spend time going back and forth with a chatbot, working through the content for each slide and what I wanted to say alongside it. That help improved the quality of my written content, and saved me time, but I still had to build the presentation myself in Google Slides or PowerPoint.
Now, I still use the chatbot to work out the content and my talking track. Once I’m happy with those, it’s like turning to that person we imagined earlier and saying, “Can you put the slides together for me?” They’ve got examples of presentations I consider to be a gold standard, along with my colour schemes, logos and fonts. They know what I’m looking for and can get on with building it.
The output is never quite perfect, but it usually gets me at least 95% of the way there. That leaves me with the small tweaks and edits, applying my judgement to what should and shouldn’t make the final version.
Having spent decades of my career building presentations, I know how long it takes to put together a good set of slides. My agent is saving me hours and hours for each one. I use that time to practise my delivery of the presentation, my weak point.
An extra pair of hands in the office
For one of my clients, I’ve been building an agent to help with onboarding their new clients. Imagine our agent now sat in the office, amongst the team.
A director has just met a potential client and made some notes. They can send the agent a photo of their hand-written notes and ask the agent to start the onboarding process. It pulls out the relevant information, helps create the client in the system of record, and asks for anything that’s missing. It has access to the records and shared folders it needs to do its job. That access is carefully restricted.
As onboarding progresses, the agent helps the team record new information, work through the required regulatory and legal checks, and file documents against the right client. Staff still review the evidence and make the decisions, but the agent helps them move through the process faster and maintain a consistently high standard.
The director can then come back and ask, “How are we getting on with onboarding that client I met last week?” or “What paperwork are we still waiting for?” I’ve spent large parts of my career answering variations of those questions. “What’s the latest on…?” and “What should we do next?” come up in almost every business.
Before you can answer those questions, you have to work out where things stand. That usually means piecing together the latest situation from two or three different systems, spreadsheets that may or may not be up to date, documents laden with comments, multiple email chains, conversations, and meeting notes. It’s time-consuming, error-prone and just painful.
A well-designed agent can do much of that legwork, leaving you more time to consider what the information means, and deciding what to do next.
Where does this leave us?
Agents are going to change how we work. Quite how far that change will go, and what it will mean for the people doing that work, remains to be seen. It’s something I’ll be writing more about as I learn from using agents myself and building them with clients.
For now, think about what you’d hand over to that imaginary person sat beside you. Getting the school dates into the calendar is a perfectly good place to start.