AI tools such as ChatGPT or Claude are widely used nowadays. But can they really improve your life significantly? I doubt it. While these tools are great at answering questions and generating text, they usually remain reactive, isolated, and require a lot of manual handover. The real way to leverage AI in your life is through the use of AI Agents.
In this post, I will explain the differences between general AI tools that everyone should be familiar with by now and AI Agents that are tailored to your individual needs.
Analogies for General AI Tools and AI Agents
At this point, I could start by defining what AI Agents are in a technical way, but you will understand the concept much better by using an analogy that has nothing to do with AI.
1. General AI Tools
You can imagine tools such as ChatGPT as a person sitting at a counter in your city. You can go to this person and ask absolutely anything. They answer your questions or write a text for you and then move on to the next person in line.
In some circumstances, the person at the counter might have a vague idea of who you are and remember a few previous interactions. For example, I could go to this person and explain that I need to inform a customer about a specific new offer my company has. The person writes the text on a piece of paper and hands it to me.
I can then take this text and send it via email, by letter, or call the customer and read it out loud to them. The tool helps me in a single step, but everything that follows still has to be done manually.
2. AI Agents
An analogy for AI Agents would be a personal assistant who works only for you and is by your side at all times. This assistant can not only answer questions and write text, but is also deeply integrated into your ecosystem. It knows your processes and can use the tools you are already using.
Over time, the agent learns about you, your preferences, and your workflows, and adapts to you personally. For example, I could tell my assistant that I talked to a customer and that they will send me an email about their request, and that I now want the assistant to take over from there.
The assistant could wait for the email, discuss the requirements back and forth with the customer, and, if needed, include additional people in the conversation. Afterwards, the assistant can define the tasks required to fulfill the customer’s request and assign them to me. Tasks that the assistant can complete on its own will be handled automatically.
The assistant could also create a meeting to present the results to the customer and invite both me and the customer.
A key difference is that an AI Agent does not only work when I explicitly instruct it to. It can also act autonomously. For example, it could monitor certain values, watch for specific events, or wait for incoming messages and then automatically start working without me having to tell it to do so.
This is just one example, but the difference should be clear by now. An AI Agent is not just answering questions, but is embedded into your systems and workflows and can use all the tools you use, similar to a real person working for you. For many use cases, it can even act internally and externally as if it were a real person.
Create Your Own AI Agent
If you want to create your own AI Agent that acts as a personal assistant and helps you with your daily tasks, you can do so using existing tools. One of the most widely used, and in my opinion one of the best, tools for creating AI Agents is n8n.
n8n allows you to create AI Agents using a simple drag-and-drop interface. It is well suited for agent-based systems because it supports long-running workflows, event-based triggers, and the orchestration of many different tools and services. If you are an advanced user, you can also extend your agent with custom code and logic.
The pricing model of n8n allows you to host the software yourself without paying anything for the tool itself. You can set up a Linux server and run n8n as a Docker container, paying only for the server costs. I use a DigitalOcean Droplet to host n8n and pay about 7 dollars per month.
If you do not want to bother with setting up and maintaining your own server, you can use n8n as a software-as-a-service solution. This costs about 20 dollars per month and can be used directly at https://n8n.io .
If you want to host your own server on DigitalOcean to use n8n, you can follow the official DigitalOcean guide:
https://www.digitalocean.com/community/tutorials/how-to-setup-n8n
In future posts, I plan to explore practical examples of AI Agents in more detail. This may include building different types of agents, explaining how they are structured, and showing how they are created step by step. I may also include videos to demonstrate how these agents work in real-world scenarios.
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