Andrew here.

If you’ve never heard of Zapier Agents, that’s fine. Currently in beta, that is Zapier’s attempt at letting you build full-blown AI workers.

Zaps run on scripts: “something happens in A, do this in B and C”.

Agents go something more like: “here’s what I want, you have access to tools A, B and C, use them to get the job done for me”.

If you enjoy video tutorials, here’s a pretty decent one I found.

And this intro guide from Zapier (plus a bunch of ideas to use and template links).

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Let’s break down one other idea here, so you can see how easy they are to build.

Want to build some agents for your business - just reply to this email, and I can help.

When people sign up to this newsletter using their business address, I’d like to find out a bit more about their company and role.

If I were doing this manually, I’d get the business website from the email address and browse it for some information.

Then I’d Google “[person’s name] + [company domain]” and look at whatever sites come up - probably a LinkedIn profile, staff info pages, maybe some news articles, etc.

That all takes time, though - but building that with a zap would be near impossible. We’d need to handle searching and scraping content, and looping through results, etc. Too many variables.

To get started, open the Agents panel and click the “New agent” button, then select “Start from scratch”.

Open the “Trigger:” dropdown and select the “Trigger by Zap” option (more on that later).

Below this, we’re going to use the following prompt:

You’ll notice a few mapped fields here “Visit Site”, “Web Search” and a Slack action.

These relate to tools that your agent has - and this is how the real magic happens.

These are like steps in a zap, except the Agent dynamically decides when (and if) to use them, and can use them repeatedly to get the job done.

The ability to search the web and visit (and scrape the content of) websites is a default for all agents - and is what makes our process work.

AI will get the website URL from the email address, visit that website to create the company summary. And with the person’s name and the company, it’ll search the internet and visit any websites it finds to create their summary.

Once done, it’ll use the final tool it has access to - the ability to send a Slack message. We can configure it as needed.

All that’s left to do is test our Agent. Click “Agent Preview”, and a chat box will open to the right. For demo purposes, I asked it to use “[email protected]”

You’ll see the agent go through the motions, searching for information about Zapier and Wade Foster (who’s the CEO).

Finally, it’ll ask for approval to send a message to Slack (this is only needed in test mode).

And there it is. Looks good!

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Now we need to automate our Agent - passing it new email addresses as people sign up to the mailing list.

It’s quite easy. Create a new zap, select whatever trigger you want, then select the “Agent” action and the ‘Run Agent’ action type.

Select the agent from the dropdown - you’ll see the agent instructions appear - then below that, you can set an input message. For our case, this should be the email you want to research.

I’ve used the [email protected] example again - but you should map an email field from your trigger.

Then set the “Pause run…” setting to Yes. This makes the zap wait until your agent finishes, and makes the response available for use in other zap steps.

Hit test, wait a moment… and there’s our report.