Leah MessengerAI changing the game again? Yep, that's right. But don't worry - here's everything you need to know about AI agents and how they'll impact your AI usage.
Imagine if you could have an intelligent assistant at your fingertips; one that analyzes data, generates content, understands your brand, does all the boring things you don't want to...
Enter: AI agents.
Get ready to say goodbye to mundane tasks and hello to a whole new level of efficiency, innovation, and happy marketing. And no, we're not joking—here's everything you need to know (including more about Optimizely's own AI agents).
An AI agent is a software program that uses AI (go figure) to perform specific tasks without the need of human intervention.
But "how do AI agents differ from basic automation", we hear you ask.
It's important to understand the difference between an agent and automation. We've been automating tasks in a conventional sense for a while now—and sure, there are some similarities between automation bots and AI agents, including:
They understand what's happening
They decide what to do
They act to reach objectives
But the main difference is how they do it... in other words: the need for human intervention.
Unlike conventional automation, AI agents have the incredible ability to memorize and learn from instructions and past data. That's right; they get smarter, they get to know you, they personalize to you.
Agents can already analyze complex information, generate content, and provide personalized recommendations—all to empower us humans to make more informed decisions and streamline our workflows. But the limit to AI agents' capabilities is certainly not going to stop there for marketers.
Okay, so what does all this have to do with you? Here are the key benefits to using AI agents within your marketing strategy:
Increased efficiency and productivity: Reduce repetitive, mundane tasks so marketers can focus on high-value work.
Enhanced creativity: Gain new ideas and insights that align with brand guidelines by using AI as a creative partner (and save time ideating as a result).
Data-driven insights: Get quick analysis of campaign results, operational metrics, and other performance metrics, and make data actionable for your team.
Next big question: where can you find AI agents? Well, for one, AI agents are manifested in Opal, Optimizely's AI assistant—contributing to a consistent experience and UI across Optimizely One.
Yep, that's right. You can benefit from increased efficiency, productivity, and creativity (and all that good stuff) with Opal.
For ultimate personalization to your brand and customers, marketers can feed Opal with:
Custom instructions
Brand information
User-specific preferences
You know, as opposed to ChatGPT's generic, robotic and very-obviously-AI-generated spiel when you ask it to write you a blog post. By adding custom instructions, brand info, and user-specific preferences, you'll get a much better output that isn't something we've all heard before.
Specialization for use cases: AI agents excel by addressing specific marketing tasks, eg. content generation and campaign planning
Easy integration into workflows: Agents are embedded within the existing tool suite to use whenever and wherever you need them (so you click X on some of those tabs now)
Brand awareness: AI agents can follow company-specific guidelines to maintain brand consistency, saving you a bunch of times with edits and checks
Execution of tasks: Opal's AI agents can use your commands to execute tasks independently, ie. You can tell your project management AI agent to look for overdue workflow steps every Sunday and send a reminder to the person assigned to the task
Continuous updates: AI agents improve with time and will automatically update when new information becomes available—so long, boring admin
Here's a little glimpse at just a few of the possibilities that could come from Optimizely's AI agents—just click for a zoom:
Campaign planning: Opal assists with planning, taking inputs on objectives, and target audiences, then generating a brief or campaign steps
Content generation: Opal ideates, drafts, and refines content based on past data and brand guidelines, bringing you relevant ideas quickly.
Project management: Opal is an organization pro and tracks tasks, deadlines and priorities to make sure you're always up to speed.
What's not to love about the idea of accelerating workflows by taking advantage of embedded AI assistants? More support, amplified human creativity, and more time for strategy—yes, please.
No surprises here but, at Optimizely, we're pretty obsessed with the idea of AI agents. So much so, that we have the vision to create agent-based workflows where Opal's capabilities will expand to support other marketing functions, like brand compliance checks and data insights across products. And this is just the beginning. Stay tuned—big things are coming.