secret sauce that regular automations are missing? One word, brain power. An AI agent brings in an AI brain, usually big language model, to make decisions dynamically. Instead of only following a rigid script, an AI agent can essentially think to itself, hm, I need to answer this user's question. Do I need to use a tool? Which one? Did that result solve the problem or should I try something else? In short, the agent can reason about the task and adapt as it goes. That's a gamecher compared to the old if this then that bots. All right. Right, now that we know conceptually what an AI agent is, let's pop open the hood and see how one actually works. Underneath, all AI agents use the same basic building blocks, just arranged or tuned differently for each use case. There are five core elements that make up an AI agent's structure. Trigger, reason, and engine, memory, tools, and output. Let's break those down. Trigger. So, this is the wakeup call for the agent. The event that starts the whole thing could be a schedule time like a cron job at 8:00 a. m. every day, a new message, for example, a DM on Telegram or Slack, a new row added to a spreadsheet, a web hook from another app, you name it. The trigger is basically anything that shows, hey, start the workflow now to kick off the agent. Often a trigger comes with some input data. For instance, the content of that new email or the details of that new spreadsheet row. So the agent has something to work with immediately. Reasoning engine, the agent's brain. Once triggered, control passes to the reasoning engine. This is usually a large language model LM like GBT4, GBT3. 5, Google's Gemini, Anthropics Claude, or whatever AI model you've plugged in. Think of this as the agent's brain. The model looks at the input plus any initial prompt or instructions you've given it and then it plans and decides what to do first. We'll break the overall goal into subtasks. Choose an action, execute it, then evaluate the result and plan the next action. Many no code platforms literally have an AI agent block or node that encapsulates this reasoning loop. Agents need memory so they don't lose context or repeat themselves. There are usually two kinds of memory. Short-term memory halts the running conversation or recent events within the current session. It's like the agents working in memory, so it remembers what just happened a moment ago or what the user asked earlier in the chat. This way, it doesn't forget information as it moves from one tool to the next during its reasoning cycle. Long-term memory is stored outside the immediate session, often in a database or vector store. This is for anything the agent should remember between runs or recall from past knowledge. For example, a user's preferences, past results or facts it learned yesterday. It might be a simple database, a Google sheet, or a fancy vector database for semantic recall. In plain terms, short-term memory is the agent's attention span and long-term memory is its knowledge base or notes that persist between sessions. Now, tools, these are the actions or skills the agent can use to interact with the world outside its own AI brain. Think of tools as the agent's hands or eyes, APIs, apps, or functions it can call. Examples of tools include making an HTTP request to fetch data from website, quering a database or Google spreadsheet, doing math calculations, sending an email, checking your calendar, etc. The agent doesn't have these abilities by default. You explicitly give it a toolbox. The popular design pattern is often called react, reason plus act. The agent, the LM reasons about what it needs, then chooses a tool to act, gets the result, then reasons again, and so on. Essentially, tools let the AI step out of just thinking in text and actually do things in the real world or digital world at least. So, finally, the agent needs to produce an outcome or response. The output node is how the agent delivers the goods at the end of its process. This could be as simple as spitting out a chat reply to a user, or it could be more actionoriented like adding a new row in a Google sheet, updating a record in a CRM, sending a message on Slack, or even generating a file. The agent keeps looping, thinking, using tools, updating memory until it decides it has achieved the goal and can produce a final result. That final result is then output through whatever channel makes sense. All AI agents you build will use some version of these five pieces. The cool part is they are modular. Of course, how smart any module X hinges on prompt quality. So, our AI 101 course has a hands-on iterative prompt refinement lesson that lets members see immediate results. Today, your agent might use a time trigger and GBT4 with a Google calendar tool to be a meetinguler. Tomorrow, you could swap the trigger to new email arrives. use a different model, plug in a spreadsheet tool instead, and it's a data entry assistant. Nothing fundamentally breaks when you swap out one component for