Building an AI Agent

An AI agent is different from an automation.

Automations follow a predefined sequence that does something when a trigger is called.

An agent is capable of understanding and reasoning. It's a digital employee that can think, remember, and act.

3 Key Components of an agent

1. Brain(LLM) - handles the reasoning, planning and language generation. For e.g Open AI, Claude
2. Memory - gives the agent ability to remember past intereactions to make better decisions.
3. Tools - How the agent interacts with outside world
   1. Retieve data - searching the web
   2. Taking action - sending an email, update database or create event
   3. Orchestration - call other agents, trigger a workflow or chaining actions

With agents, you have single-agent system or multi-agent system

Single agent system

The user prompts, the agent reads the prompt, then gives the solution.

Multi agent system

Multi-agent systems have more struture. You might have different agents doing different tasks. For example, you might have a sales agent, a marketing agent and a customer support agent. Then you might also have one supervising agent who handles the prompt and decides who to send the prompt to.

Setting Guardrails

• Identify risks and edge cases in your specific use case
• Optimize for security purpose and user experience
• Adjust guardrails over time.

Asides from using a a AI agent builder like n8n to build these automations, you need to define agent prompts.

Agent Prompt

• Role - What kind of assistant it is?
• Ask - What is it trying to accomplish
• Input - What data does it have access to?
• Tools - What actions can it take?