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by TranquilMarmot 497 days ago
We're working on Agents over at Zapier, https://zapier.com/agents

You can have Agents run behaviors async by attaching triggers to them, for example when you get a specific email or something gets updated in a CRM. You can also give the agent access to basically any third-party action you can think of.

Like others in this thread have pointed out, there's a nice middle-ground here between an LLM-only interface and some nice UI around it, as well as ways to introduce determinism where it makes sense.

The product is still in its early days and we're iterating rapidly, but feel free to check it out and give us some feedback. There's a decent free plan.
1 comments
randomcatuser 497 days ago
Nice! I'm kinda curious -- what do you see as Zapier's advantage when it comes to building agents? It seems like everyone is doing something similar? (e.g Lindy, Gumloop)

Agents have a pre-iPhone feel to them (when everyone was making phones with keyboards). What do you think the ultimate Agents looks like?

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TranquilMarmot 495 days ago
As the other commenter pointed out, Zapier already has 7k+ apps that can be connected to. Zapier has already figured out the "hard parts" connecting to other apps, which are things like authentication, getting APIs to return standardized schemas, and most importantly business relationships with other companies so that if things need changing, we can reach out. We also have tested and proven infrastructure that can handle massive scale.

I definitely agree that agents are very early days - as for the "ultimate agent" it feels like everything is moving towards them being a sort of co-worker, if that makes sense. I think handling human-in-the-loop scenarios nicely is going to be vital to an agent actually being useful. i.e. you clock in in the morning and check out all the stuff your agent did overnight and can approve/change/reject tasks. There's a ton of healthy competition in the space, so in a year or two we'll all have a much better idea of where the tech is going.

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OccamsMirror 497 days ago
I don't work for Zapier, but I think it's clear that their advantage is they already have the ability to work with different product's APIs at their fingertips. That's going to make creating a working agent that's actually productive a lot easier than for most.

I wouldn't call it a moat, but it's definitely a giant head start.

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