The Easiest Way To Build AI Agents For Beginners (So Easy)

AI agents are officially here and it seems like everyone can't stop talking about them. But how do you actually set up and use an AI agent? Most of the methods out there are quite frankly very confusing and very technical. But there's one tool you're probably already familiar with that makes building AI agents surprisingly easy. And today I'm going to show you how to use it to build some incredible AI workflows and agents that you can set up in minutes even if you have zero technical experience. So the tool we're going to use for this is called Zapier, the sponsor of today's video. You may already know Zapier as the automation platform that connects thousands of apps together, but they recently launched something called agents and it takes everything to a whole new level. I partnered with Zapier to show you how powerful this is. So, I'll have a link for it down in the description if you want to follow along with me. When you first log into your Zapier account, you're going to notice that right here, you have the ability to set up an agent. But instead of clicking on this button, I'm going to make this a lot easier by coming right here to the Zapier co-pilot. This will allow you to just describe to Zapier exactly what type of workflow you want to set up. And then the AI is basically going to do all the work for you. For this first example, I have a Google sheet that I put together that's a mini CRM. It's got a list of brands that I'm reaching out to for potential collaborations. Each row has the brand name, a contact email, the last time we reached out to them, the current status, and the follow-up date. Now, the problem is I have to manually check this sheet every day to see who I need to follow up with. If it's been more than a week since I last contacted someone and they haven't responded, I need to send them a follow-up email. So, let's build an AI agent that handles this entire workflow for me. I'll return back to Zapier, and inside the co-pilot, I will just describe exactly what I'm looking for. I have a Google sheet called mini CRM that I use to track brands I'm reaching out to for collaborations. Each row has the brand name, contact email, etc. I want you to build me an agent that runs every morning and checks for any rows where the status is follow-up needed. For each one, send a friendly follow-up email to the contact email address, reminding them about the collaboration opportunity. After sending the email, update the current status column to follow-up sent and update the last outreach date to today's date. I will then submit that. Here you can see co-pilot thinking through this process and it's making sure that it has the ability to even set up an agent that can do this. Since Zapier connects with so many different tools, it's a good chance that the workflow you're looking for and the agent you're looking to create is going to be possible. Here it's saying that it is possible. So to continue with this, I'll click on where it says continue with agent builder. Over here you can see co-pilot setting up our agent for us. And over here on the right, we can see exactly what the agent looks like. Now, as Co-Pilot goes along, it might ask you some questions. For instance, right here, it's asking me what time I would like this agent to run every morning. So, I'm going to tell it 8:00 a. m. In order for your agent to work, it will need access to the tools that you want it to use. Here, the Code Pilot is telling me that I do not have my Gmail account connected with Zapier. So, I need to establish that connection so the agent can actually do its work. To do that, I can click right here where it says add tool. From here, I will select Gmail and I'll select the tab that says take action. Scrolling down, I'm going to find one that says send email. That looks like the perfect tool for this agent to use. Since my Gmail is not yet connected up with this Zapier account, I'll click right here where it says connect. Here, I'll select the email address I want to connect up with Zapier. Click through and give it the permissions it needs. For purposes of this workflow, I'm going to let the agent generate the subject and body for each email. And then I'll click on save. Next, we can see that we also need to connect up our Google sheet. There are two tools that Zapier needs access to. the ability to update spreadsheet rows and the ability to get many spreadsheet rows. Let's establish those connections. I'll click on these three dots and click on configure. Now you'll go through the same process that we use for Gmail but for Google Sheets. Once your Google Sheets is connected up with Zapier, you'll see this menu right here that's very similar to the one we just looked at for Gmail where it's asking us what we want to input for each of these different fields. Once again, I'm going to let the agent select the value for each field and click on save. Great. Now, just one more to take care of, which is Google Sheets update spreadsheet row. Once again, I will

click on the three dots, click on configure, and allow the agent to select the values for each field and click on save. Now, it looks like all the tools are set up. So, I'm going to return back to the co-pilot and tell it all the tools are now set up. We can see now that co-pilot has access to everything it needs for this agent to work. So, it is now finishing setting up the agent for us. Once the co-pilot is finished, it'll send you a message letting you know everything that it set up. Over here on the right, we can see the exact agent, all the instructions that it's given, all the tools it has access to, and any knowledge sources if any. To continue with this, click where it says agent preview. This will give you the option to test the agent. I always suggest you test an agent before you actually schedule it out or deploy it. That way you make sure it's working correctly. Let's go ahead and test this one. Here we can see our agent getting to work. It simulated a trigger. And now it is going through the workflow. It is looking at my Google sheet looking for all the columns that say follow-up needed. And it found seven brands with the follow-up needed status. Now, it is heading over to my Gmail to actually send out those emails. Since this is just a test run, we can see a preview here of what the email is going to look like. It says, "Hi there. I hope this message finds you well. I'm reaching out to follow up on a previous conversation regarding a potential collaboration opportunity with Stellar Souls. " And then it signs it my name. I think this is pretty good, but I want to make some changes to this. I want these emails to feel a bit more personal and like me. So, what I'll do is if I want to make any changes, I'll click right here again where it says co-pilot. And I'm just going to describe what changes I want to make. Can you make the follow-up emails more personalized? Have the agent reference the brand in the subject line and keep the tone friendly and professional. Keep it short, no more than three to four sentences. Let's send that to the co-pilot and see what it comes up with. Once again, when it's finished, it'll send you a message letting you know what it did. In this case, it made the emails more personalized. Let's test out the newest edition. I'll click here again where it says agent preview. And let's do another test here. And here we can see that this is a lot different. The body is a lot more casual and personal as well as the subject line as well. So now this is perfect. Just like that, we have a fully functioning AI agent that checks my outreach sheet every single morning and follows up with brands for me automatically. And to do this, I didn't have to write a single line of code. Once I'm happy with this and ready to deploy it, all I have to do is click up here and click on publish. And this will then be live and run for me every morning at 8 a. m. If you're at a loss as to what workflows to automate, Zapier has a whole template gallery with pre-built agents that you can just grab and customize. To find those, click on the top right here where it says new agent. Inside of here, instead of describing to Copilot what you want to create, you can come over to the templates here on the left. We have ones for call follow-ups, lead generation, daily expense summary emails, business development call briefings, lead enrichment agents, sales prep agents, and even inbox categorizer. And because these are just templates, you can use Copilot to customize any of them to fit your exact workflow. For instance, let's say I want to use this inbox categorizer. I'll select use this template. Click on create. And here we see the template in the middle. I'll click on copilot and then just describe exactly how I want copilot to tailor this template for my needs. In this case, the default template automatically categorizes each of the emails into important, work, personal, and to-do. But I want to use my own labels, which are junk, cold outreach, and existing customers. So, I'm just telling Copilot which labels I use. Now, over here, we can see that those instructions have now been updated. Down here at the bottom, we can see all the tools that it needs for this agent to work. And since we've already set up a Gmail connection with the last agent that we used, we don't have to set up any new tools. They're already connected and ready to go. Once again, I would then preview this agent and once I'm happy with it, actually publish it. So you can see how templates give you a massive head start and then C-pilot lets you fine-tune everything to fit exactly what you need. What makes Zapier agents particularly useful is that you don't have to prompt the agent to actually get to work. Zapier agents run on triggers, which means they kick off automatically when certain things happen. For instance, when you create a

new agent, you'll see the option up here to select a trigger to start the agent. By clicking on this, you can see all the different agents. We have ones right here to run the agents on a schedule at the same time every day, week, or month. Going back, we also have the option to have triggers based on Google Sheets. For instance, when a new spreadsheet is added, when a new row is added to a spreadsheet, or when there's a new worksheet. There's also ones for Google Calendar, like when an event ends, it can trigger an agent. when an event is cancelled or when there's a new event. We have ones for Notion, for Box, for Slack, for Gmail. Anytime a label is added to a conversation or there's a new attachment or new email, you can trigger off an agent. And they even have MCP support as well, so your agents can be working in the background doing tasks for you while you're completely focused on something else. And with over 8,000 app integrations, these agents can work with basically any tools that you already use. Now, to be clear, agents are different from traditional automated workflows. Zapier actually has both of these built in. And I think knowing when to use each one makes a huge difference. If you have a test that needs to run the exact same way every single time, like sending a Slack notification when a form is submitted or copying data from one spreadsheet to another, that's a workflow. It doesn't require any thinking or discretion. It's the same process every single time. For that, you would want to set up a workflow. But if you have a task that requires actual thinking, like researching a topic, summarizing a document, or making decisions based on context, that's where agents come in. And the really cool part is that you can actually combine both of them. You could have a workflow that triggers an agent or an agent that kicks off a workflow. For example, I did that right here. Here I have a workflow. So, anytime I get a new email that has an attachment, that attachment is automatically saved to Google Drive. I don't need an AI to do that. It is very simple and straightforward and it's done the same way every single time. But after that, I then have an agent that runs and that agent will then look at that file to determine what to do with it. Because that requires some discretion and intelligence, we have an AI do that. So by using Zapier, you get the best of both worlds inside of one platform, both workflows and AI agents. So that's Zapier agents and C-pilot. Whether you're building from scratch or starting with the template, you can have AI agents doing real work across all your apps in just a few minutes. If you want to try it out for yourself, you can actually start using this for free. They give you enough on the free tier to build and test your agents. So there's really no reason not to try it. If you want to get started, make sure to click the link down in the description. Thanks so much for watching and I'll see you in the next video. Bye for now.