For a long time, I thought AI agents were something only large companies really needed. We are a relatively small business, and most of our customer communication was handled manually. But as the number of requests grew, it became harder to answer everyone quickly, especially in the evenings and on weekends. That was when I started looking into custom AI agents and came across https://masterlabs.ai/services/ai-agents-development-company.
I wasn’t looking for a fancy chatbot that could only answer three prepared questions. I wanted something that could actually become part of our normal workflow.
A surprising amount of our time was spent answering the same questions again and again. People wanted to know about prices, availability, how the process worked, or whether we could handle their particular request.
None of those questions were difficult, but together they took several hours every week.
There was another problem too. A potential client could leave a request late in the evening, and by the time someone from our team answered the next morning, that person might already be talking to another company.
So the first things I wanted to automate were pretty simple:
Answering common customer questions.
Collecting basic information from new leads.
Understanding what service the person was interested in.
Passing qualified requests to our team.
Helping schedule calls or meetings.
Keeping basic customer information connected with our existing workflow.
I didn’t want AI making important decisions instead of us. I just wanted it to deal with the repetitive first part of communication.
Before this, I assumed developing an AI agent mostly meant choosing an AI model and connecting it to a website. In reality, much more time went into figuring out what the agent should actually do.
We had to think through real conversations with customers. What information should it ask for? When should it stop trying to answer and transfer the conversation to a person? Which documents could it use as a knowledge base? What should happen if it wasn’t sure about something?
That part was useful even outside the AI project because it forced me to look at our own sales process properly.
There were quite a few small situations I had never really thought about before. For example, two customers can ask almost the same question but actually need completely different services. A useful agent has to notice that difference instead of throwing the same canned answer at everyone.
One of my requirements was that the system shouldn’t create more work for the team.
We already had our usual tools, so I didn’t want employees opening yet another dashboard just to see what the AI had been doing. The agent needed to fit into the existing process and pass useful information forward.
For me, that is probably the biggest difference between a basic chatbot and a properly developed AI agent. A chatbot talks. An agent should be able to use information, follow a workflow and interact with other systems when needed.
The biggest difference was not some dramatic reduction in staff or anything like that. It was simply that fewer small tasks were constantly interrupting the working day.
People could get answers immediately. New requests arrived with more context, so we didn’t have to start every conversation from zero. The team could spend more time on clients who actually needed a person.
I also liked that we could start with one specific use case instead of trying to automate half the company at once. Once that worked properly, it became much easier to understand where else an AI agent could actually be useful.
If I were starting again, I wouldn’t begin with the question, “What can AI automate?”
I would first write down the boring tasks that happen every single day.
Which questions does the team answer repeatedly? Where do leads disappear? What information do employees constantly copy between systems? What simple task keeps taking ten minutes when it should take one?
That gives you a much better starting point.
For us, the useful part of an AI agent wasn’t that it felt futuristic. It was that it took a fairly ordinary business problem and made that part of the work a little less manual. And honestly, that was exactly what I wanted from it.