When I launched my startup nearly two decades ago, I was an experienced coder—and little else. Overnight, I had to play every role and wear every hat in the company. It was a crash course in entrepreneurship: salesperson, marketing expert, customer service rep, hiring manager, and more. Those lessons were invaluable, teaching me how to grow slowly and sustainably. I’m proud of the path I carved. But if AI agents had existed back then, entrepreneurship would have been far more accessible—and I might have gotten more sleep.
When starting out as a business owner, staying laser-focused on your most critical priority—your product—is essential. AI agents can make that focus possible by taking over tasks that don’t require your personal attention. If 2024 was the year of LLMs, 2025 will mark the rise of AI agents—a shift that promises big advantages for fledgling startups. Here’s how they can help. But first, let’s quickly clarify the difference between LLMs and AI agents.
Executive Chefs Versus Line Cooks
In a whitepaper published late last year, Google used the example of a restaurant chef to demonstrate how AI agents work. To accomplish their goal of creating delicious dishes for patrons, the chef gathers information, plans dishes, executes those dishes, and tweaks as they go. The authors explain:
“Just like the chef, agents use cognitive architectures to reach their end goals by iteratively processing information, making informed decisions, and refining next actions based on previous outcomes.”
Large language models like ChatGPT are extraordinarily powerful tools for speeding up all kinds of tasks, from research and data analysis to editing and tidying up your schedule. They work based on input, or prompts, and don’t retain data from previous conversations.
Agents, on the other hand, are software that can make decisions, take actions, communicate with others, and more generally, work towards a greater goal—all independently. They also retain information from prior interactions.
To expand on Google’s metaphor, if an AI agent is like an executive chef—overseeing, planning, executing, adjusting—LLMs are like very talented line cooks, excellent at taking orders and executing, but never working entirely independently. They cook the menu, they don’t create or refine it.
LLMs help business owners improve their productivity, especially as it pertains to meaningful, high-impact work. AI agents stand to take those productivity gains to the next level. For young businesses, they can be a game changer.
How Agents Transform Early-Stage Entrepreneurship
Socrates said, “Wisdom is knowing what you don’t know.” Wise early-stage entrepreneurs embrace this truth: there’s so much you don’t know and always more to learn.
AI agents can handle repetitive manual tasks, freeing you to focus on what truly matters in entrepreneurship: refining your product, growing your business, and continuously learning. Take email, for example—a tool that’s both a blessing and a curse in the modern workplace, facilitating communication while potentially devouring hours of your workday. As a business owner, I receive hundreds of emails daily. Sorting through them is not only time-consuming but also energy-draining. Let’s say you develop an AI agent to organize your inbox. By automatically surfacing high-priority emails and tasks, it saves you time and energy while ensuring that crucial or time-sensitive messages never slip through the cracks.
You might be wondering: how else can AI agents transform early-stage business processes?
A QA agent like fix.ai can monitor your company’s processes to ensure quality standards are met. In the context of SaaS companies or e-commerce, a QA agent could run regular checks, ensuring smooth operations and adherence to parameters you set, and preventing issues before they arise. Another powerful application? Origami agents, which are ideal for boosting sales. These agents can browse the web to identify potential leads—individuals or businesses likely interested in your product. By defining specific criteria, you can let the agent find and recommend prospects, helping you scale your outreach and grow your customer base efficiently.
And this is just the beginning. The possibilities for agents, off-the-shelf or developed in-house, are nearly endless—fielding customer inquiries, developing marketing campaigns, troubleshooting product issues, and more. Crucially, agents don’t just carry out assignments; they take initiative, freeing up wide swaths of your time—time you can redirect to high-impact tasks that will move the needle for your fledgling company.
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