Agents Don't Need to Be Complicated

I think a lot of people hear "agent" and think they must be complicated to set up. They can get pretty advanced, but they're pretty easy to get started with now. You don't need to watch youtube videos or take a course. You don't need to open the terminal anymore. You might already have the app for ChatGPT or Claude installed on your computer.

I'm guessing many reading this are very used to using chat, but haven't taken the extra step to setting up connectors or plugins to talk to the apps they use every day, or had an agent do something they either hate doing or would never do on their own because their eyes would glaze over.

If you're concerned about the labs accessing your data, you approve what the agents get access to. And if you're like me and are more on the YOLO end of things, you can set it to auto approve. If you're on a paid plan, you don't have to "improve the model for everyone" by letting the labs train on your data and sessions. It's either off by default or with a quick toggle switch.

A great place to start today if you try "Work" in ChatGPT or Claude Cowork is setting up a daily brief. It's a nice entry point for a whole class of "what should just happen for me" type of things. It's a good reason to connect your email and your calendar and your slack or teams. Not to mention your more specialized tools like Asana or Jira or Linear or Canva, etc. If you give it feedback it remembers it and tries to incorporate it in the future.

But that's just the beginning of what you can do once you get the hang of it.

Even if there's not a connector or plugin for what you want to do, if you can do it in a browser then agents can help do it for you.

I have them check linkedin comments and messages for me and update my crm - something that's really hard and tedious to do by hand.

They do call prep for me - pulling from as many sources and previous call transcripts if necessary.

They coach me on how I did on calls based on the purpose and how I can improve for next time on communicating more clearly.

An agent keeps me up to date on bookkeeping every week, which is something I've been terrible at for years. And I get to stay out of Quickbooks Online as much as possible (my accountant loves it, I do not).

I've started having them mine my meeting transcripts and my Github + Linear activity for ideas to write about and share here and elsewhere to support the type of business I am building now.

One of the best ideas I've heard I'm about to put into practice is a "what did I commit to" reminder built from call transcripts and emails to make sure I'm not dropping any balls.

All of these things can be set up just by talking to chatgpt in work mode or Claude in Cowork. And this is just a taste of what you can do on your own.

It gets really interesting when you start engaging agents across multiple people and across team boundaries.

Sound cool? Set something up and tell me about it.

An agent will make sure I don't miss your message.

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