AI Automation Agencies(AAA) are coming your way.
AI Automation Agencies are sprouting up in the fertile grounds of AI.
Welcome to the hype cycle of the new agency model.
The proliferation of Large Language models has spurred a new economic boon with a new breed of AI automation experts amongst us.
This wave of digital experts, mostly from the social media world are becoming self identified experts in all things AI. Some of these are calling themselves AI Automation Agencies (AAA) which aim to help bridge the gap between curious business owners eager to jump on the bandwagon and the world of low and no code development.
Now this doesn't mean there are not exceptional coders and automation engineers out there. It’s just many of the ‘gold rush’ wannabes believe they can simply ask GPT “ Hey build me a bot that I can sell to folks”.
That’s both untrue and unrealistic.
Chatbots are nothing new. Many companies have them deployed already and most of us are irritated by the persistent pop ups. If you have ever dropped in on a car dealers website, you will see what I mean and decide its easier to just go to the dealership. Then the circle of frustration will be complete with the introduction of a human being.
Talking of which. AI models are learning languages and the old coding phrase “Garbage in, Garbage out” is now “Ask poor questions, you’ll get poor answers”. AI needs to learn and become iterative though is efforts, the more it does, the better it will get…eventually. A LLM such of ChatGPT or more specifically Open AI is a gateway to a text driven language model. A genie in a bottle, with your every command it begs to be helpful.
Back to the human side of this. Most companies are looking at ways to automate tasks, reducing the self created friction from a process that even a caveman could do it. Document search, finding the best formula for an excel spreadsheet, customer enquiries. A bot of this nature is but a flea on the dog and most of these AI automation companies are just here to scratch.
The model in developing a true AI automation Agency is built on a firm understanding of business processes, decision waterfalls, required capabilities and quantifiable outcomes. Only then can you go to work on building a technical solution based on somewhat complex mix of Langchain, OpenAI, Python and Json. And with this complexity comes supportability, patches, code and bug fixes etc. This is simply not something that can be solved by a highly capable social media expert who has decided to pivot.
The real innovators will niche down and provide industry specific solutions. Legal, Medical research, Education are all ripe for innovation. The laggards will likely be old businesses in the consumer industry who barely own a website or have failed miserably to place higher on Google search. Maybe the social media mavens can stay in their swim-lane and provide better services to these customers who will now likely be ignored by others jumping on the AI bandwagon.
The opportunity is uncharted but history has always shown that the people who make the money in the gold rush sell the shovels.