I Learned How to Build an AI Agent
I’ve been on a learning binge lately. Something about this winter has stood out to me as a primed learning environment, and YouTube is such an endless resource. It’s why I pay for premium, it’s just too good of a deal for someone who watches more YouTube than TV nowadays.
In this blog post, I’ve shared the resources that made a significant impact on me, my journey, and my understanding of the integration of AI into my working, professional, and personal life — especially regarding my engagement with AI tools as a prolific user.
In my efforts to make the internet fun for me again, I realized that having a website is the only way to make that happen. And you can’t be on the internet anymore without learning and getting familiar with AI tools.
My engagement with AI tools has turned out to be very valuable for me, since my workplace is actively promoting internal AI adoption across the whole company. The feedback loop of learning & using AI has been an overwhelmingly positive experience for me and an opportunity I’m using to differentiate myself to company leadership and clients alike.
I promised myself back in 2023 when I first learned how insidious workplace politics could be that I would do everything in my power to make sure that my impact is felt & that I have all the leverage I need to accomplish my goals.
Learning what AI agents are and how to build & use one is par for the course in this line of thinking. Innovation really is key if you want to keep the opportunities coming. Even more useful if you’re trying to accumulate generational wealth as an aspiring first-generation multi-millionaire, like myself.
Now, I’m not saying I’m a fan of politicking at work but I am saying that if you must politick, put all your energy into positioning yourself well and the rest will follow. People will only see what they want to see, so make sure you can reach as many audiences as possible. It’s called leverage and you want as much of it as possible.
I mention this point because there is a concept I’ll be exploring in an upcoming essay called “technofeudalism” coined by Yanis Voroufakis. Let’s not, as a society, lose our grounding in the absence of morality in pursuit of progress.
Some discourse spaces will argue that you can’t have a 100% ethical anything under capitalism, to which I would agree. However, do not let that trick you into assuming that any effort at all is inconsequential. Things have progressed into spiritual warfare and if you’re not grounded, you’re at risk of becoming a zombie while you’re still alive. I don’t want that for you.
Adapting AI into your life as a personalized assistant is probably the best way to make sure AI isn’t used against you. I’ve spent the last 6 months learning and practicing AI tools as much as possible and I would love for you to know that it literally is so valuable because it’s friendly for everyone. It’s a chat function. You chat with AI to use it & to build things with it. I foresee that Prompt Engineering will be a very popular role across industries very soon.
This post has taken a bit of a left turn away from AI agents specifically but that’s okay because it’s all interrelated.
In learning how to build AI agents, design and test and utilize custom GPTs, putting together workflows boosted with automation, and all of the other fun and useful things you can do with AI, one thing is abundantly clear to me.
The arts and humanities are more important than ever.
For most of us, AI will be a benign force. I don’t see it being that way for long if too little people are engaging with it.
The balance that needs to be kept is determining for yourself where your line between human and machine is. I don’t use Siri, or Alexa, but I engage with ChatGPT multiple times a day, daily. I have boundaries with my use, because as invested as I become with technology and data and AI the more I must concern myself with ethics and morality and relationships with other humans.
The Pros
You can automate stuff. Knowing or discerning what to automate then becomes the more difficult part. The technology is easy enough to access, just not for free. I can afford to pay for ChatGPT Plus, and I recognize that there is a population of people who can’t make that a regular expense.
I haven’t gotten too far in my automation journey, strictly because discovering what I want to automate is a process in and of itself. Most people don’t even know what their own processes are enough to write them all out to train their AI agents and automation flows. This level of self-awareness is necessary and painstaking.
The Cons
More of our lives will become about working. It’s a natural progression that as we automate, we must oversee the automation.
You also can’t be sure how AI will affect entire industries and SOPs. It’s best practice right now to only automate those processes that you currently use — don’t automate a process you’ve never tried before, that’s dumb because you’re just creating more work for yourself. Discernment is the most important quality in AI use, adoption, and automation.
We humans do not have a great track record with discernment, but I have faith. You should too. We honestly just need good, conscious, moral users. Be one.
xo,
Jade
