AI agents represent the evolution beyond simple chatbots, capable of autonomously planning and executing complex business workflows from start to finish.

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AI agents are the next level of business automation — smart digital assistants that don’t just talk the talk, but also walk the walk.

This means that, unlike ChatGPT-style chatbots that simply answer questions and generate content, they can plan and carry out complex tasks with minimal human input.

Sounds good? Well, businesses are already putting them to work, and the good news is you don’t need to be an AI expert or computer scientist to do it.

So here are five high-impact ways that just about any business can start automating repetitive jobs, freeing up people’s valuable time for more valuable, human-centric work.

Automated Customer Service Resolution

While chatbots like ChatGPT are widely used to conduct customer service conversations, agents can automate the entire workflow, from initial call to troubleshooting, and implement solutions such as issuing refunds, updating customer records or managing orders and subscriptions. Customer service is a great use case for agents because many queries follow a standard format and rely on data held in FAQs and knowledge bases. This means human operators have more time to deal with truly critical, complex or sensitive customer service tickets.

Some tools to take a look at if you want to start looking into customer service automation include boost.ai, ada, chatbase and Haptik.

Sales CRM Management

Why spend time manually combing spreadsheets and logging interactions when agents can manage your sales CRM for you? Managing sales pipelines often involves many repetitive admin tasks that are perfectly suitable for delegating to AI. Agents can qualify leads with automated SMS and chat, identify the hottest prospects, schedule calls, and keep CRM records updated. This means human sales teams focus on building relationships and closing deals.

Options here include Salesforce Agentforce, Zoho CRM, Relevance AI and HubSpot.

Compliance Automation

Keeping up with constantly changing rules and regulations businesses have to adhere to can be costly and time-consuming. Agentic AI is ideal for lending a hand here, due to its ability to automate many monitoring and reporting processes, as well as take action to fix errors and omissions and conduct audit trails. This is work that often involves following straightforward rules where consistency and reliability are paramount, and many problems come down to human error, meaning they’re perfect for delegating to agents.

Some tools offering agentic solutions to compliance automation include datasnipper, Sprinto, Complyance and norm.ai.

Recruitment Screening And Scheduling

Picking the right people to join your team is not something you’re likely to entirely trust a computer with. But the initial stages of the recruitment process involve many repetitive, time-consuming tasks that tie up human resources, probably best used elsewhere. This could involve drafting and placing ads according to your brief, personalizing them for different recruitment platforms, summarizing CVs and shortlisting candidates based on how they fit your criteria, administering initial screening tests, then contacting the best prospects and scheduling formal interviews.

These are some tools and platforms that could help you get started: Cohort, Paradox and URecruits.

Market Intelligence Reporting

Keeping up with the latest developments in your market or industry, as well as the activities of competitors, can involve hours of research and reading reports. This is all time that could be better spent focusing on developing your own market positioning strategy. Agentic AI can work as a research assistant, helping you understand the consumer trends, competitor activity and other external factors impacting business success. Then it can compile reports personalized for unique stakeholders, and flag emerging trends in real-time, to ensure everyone in the organization has up-to-date market intelligence at their fingertips.

Tools with agentic capabilities in this field include AlphaSense, V7, and Crayon.

The shift to agentic AI represents a practical evolution in how businesses operate, moving beyond experimentation to real-world deployment. The five use cases outlined here share common characteristics that make them ideal starting points: they involve repetitive workflows, rely on structured data, and follow predictable rules. Start with one area where automation would free up the most time for your team, pilot it carefully, and scale from there.