Episode 136: AI Agents That Actually Automate Your Work (Real Demos & Best Tools Compared)

People are actually scared to use those kind of tools like regular people even though you can write code anything they are kind of scared to and those tools are really advanced but what we are really and the audience for this show is more about everyday people everyday small businesses how do they automate their work how can they automate the work they do daily workflows this is more about that.

Hi my name is Dmitri Panici and I'm a content creator agency owner and AI enthusiast you're listening to the AI Agents podcast brought to you by Jotform and featuring our very own CEO and founder Aytekin Tank this is the show where artificial intelligence meets innovation productivity and the tools shaping the future of work enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the AI Agents podcast in this episode we're talking about AI agentic workflow builders how you doing tonight Aytekin?

Hey Dmitri I'm doing great so here at Jotform we are doing lots of work on our workflow product we had this product for a while we released it in 2021 but at that time it was just approve like it was an approval product like you receive a form and then you send it to someone for approval kind of thing and in 2024 we actually renamed or reinvented it as Jotform workflows because it started to have more features and now what we are working on is giving it powers giving it AI powers being able to create workflows with AI using AI within workflows those kind of stuff and while I was doing that I've been reviewing other products as well so I thought hey why don't we cover this topic today?

Absolutely and just kind of kick things off I want to talk about the landscape of agentic workflow builders I think at first glance and we've talked about different automation platforms before on the show AI and automation have kind of gone from being completely separate things to now most of the AI tools existing out there are having scheduled tasks originally with things like ChatGPT but they become much more usable it's not just running a prompt at a certain time every day it's running a prompt that actually has connection to different tools in the same way that an automation would naturally work in N8N make.com or otherwise Zappy or otherwise and what we're going to show you today is how Jotform has brought to you a really nice agentic workflow and how other tools have built upon where they were at when it comes to N8N and other different AI tools automating work through scheduled tasks.

You can do this kind of stuff with products like Cloud Code CodeX and different tools but some tools people are actually scared to use those kind of tools like regular people even though you can write code anything they are kind of scared to and those tools are really advanced but what we are really and the audience for this show is more about everyday people everyday small businesses how do they automate their work how can they automate the work they do daily workflows they don't need to be technical how can they automate the work they do daily workflows and if you are using tools like Cloud Code you can use tools like skills and I've been discussing with a friend and he was putting all these workflows inside skills feature just describing what it does and creates a skill and then basically every time he needs to do that workflow he's just running that skill and that also works well but I'm more looking into no-code products that can actually do those things everything for you like if you need to send an email you shouldn't need to set up all kinds of weird stuff it should send the email for you.

No I agree and I think people have different levels of comfortability as to what products they're going to use and what level of technicality it requires to put something together so yeah for sure.

Yeah I'm going to start with my demos and then I know that you have some demo as well and we'll go from there.

So workflow automation we released Jotform workflows a while ago this landing page is still not about AI we have been adding AI internally we still haven't launched the AI version of the product that's coming up in like two months in June but we are working on it heavily and I'm so excited about it because when we interview people we see that they love how AI together with a workflow product becomes so successful so useful.

So I'm just going to start with my demo basically when you're creating in the past you would just create it manually just add these stuff but now you can actually describe your workflow and it will create it for you so I actually decided to pick a single prompt and then use it on various services so that I can compare how they do every Friday morning ask employees to send what projects they worked on during that week so that we can track hours by project so I'm not going to add a full existing form or upload anything I just want to create the form as well so I'll just go ahead and say generate and this is going to trigger Jotform workflows AI builder so it first decides on the starting point I said every morning so it's going to be on schedule it's scheduled every week on Friday 3 a.m. I would have made it like 9 a.m. but that's fine I didn't define it so one thing we try to do is just try to make it opinionated so that it doesn't like many of these products they were slow and they constantly ask me questions so in our product we try to make it more opinionated just try to pick the best defaults so that I don't have to answer hundreds of different questions so it created a schedule for me like this is every week at 3 a.m. maybe 9 a.m. run this schedule and this Friday we are recording on 17th so it's already past so it's scheduling for the next Friday and yeah this looks good I don't need to change anything and then why did it go back to so yeah I guess it didn't save it okay let's see save still okay yeah I mean we are improving the product and then after the schedule we are sending a form to people here's the form basically this is the form let's take a look at the form it created it created a weekly project report form employee name project information so it's going to send this to people every week and then to receive submissions from it so this was Jotform and I'm going to showcase some other products.

The next one I'm going to show is like I tried to find products that just launched recently because there are a lot of cool ideas and I like stuff and I like their different personalities of these AI agents turn ideas into products that sell so this is atoms atoms.dev basically you can create a SaaS app you can create an e-commerce platform internal tool personal projects pretty much everything it's pretty diverse and I found it on Product Hunt it was the number one product of the day and yeah it looks pretty cool let's look at the demo so what I'm going to do is because these products are very slow constantly asking questions I just took the screenshots and I'm going to show it like this so this is the first screen I entered my prompt and then it asked me to sign up which is fine it has Google login which takes me like 10 seconds to sign up and then basically on the right side you see what it's building and then on the left side you can see what it does and then it told me what it's going to do it's going to do a huge project it's just decided to do this huge project with employee dashboard project management weekly submissions just so many things but yeah I approved it so it started working on this it took a while though maybe I can see from the screenshots this one looks like it took like 50 minutes or something like that yeah so it created this tool internal tool which is really cool time track and it even has the logo and everything and then I can add a project and it even created prepopulated projects things like that so this is the first version of the app builds and then I can just fill out the form and submit it and once it completed the first project it continued with the next steps like timesheet reminder part and so yeah maybe I put it accidentally okay yeah it asked me to give an API key to be able to send an email so I don't think I was able to complete the email part that was kind of disappointing but the internal tool looked pretty cool.

So the next product that I want to talk about is Mule Run I love the name I love the mules it's very cool your personal AI always on ask before you ask create multi-panel flat vector poster analyze price movements so you can do pretty much everything the always-on AI agent that automates your workflows end to end so it's always on it works all the time for you self-evolving AI workforce proactive workflow automation I love the titles an AI workforce so let's take a look at what it looked like so this is Mule Run very similar to Adams I entered my prompt to a text area and then it asked me what kind of format do you want it's kind of HTML I picked HTML so it asked me some questions and then from those questions it actually started project how to define the project list and this is kind of as for product I prefer a product to be opinionated so that you can start with something working then you can customize it if you want but they were more trying to understand my needs at this point and then yeah they created this form weekly timesheet form which looked great and then I asked it to send it to my demo email address published page first I needed to publish I guess and then it was published and again it needed to use an automated email service like Google Apps Script and I was kind of stuck there so it gave me the code which I would copy to my app script for my Gmail to be able to send emails I guess so at this point I gave up on this one as well.

The next one I'm going to show is Pipedream looks like they're actually joined the Workday team what do you want to automate I love that title prompt run and deploy AI agent in seconds so you can do lots of things email categorization build an agent that monitors my inbox and categorize my emails so AI agents and workflows they're kind of now merging they're becoming like one thing and right so summarize my emails in Notion workflow builder so I'm going to show the Pipedream how it worked similarly I entered my prompt and then it asked me to sign up I signed up and it started working on the project so it's doing all these reasoning making a plan and asking me to approve the plan and I approved its plan and basically it's showing the plan here showing what it's doing constantly here so it's good that you can actually see what it's doing while it's working on it and basically it created this weekly trigger and then send weekly so instead of email it decided to send weekly Slack messages I think that's pretty cool I like that idea and you can pick how you want to receive these notifications connect with your Slack account so it was pretty cool as well or you can connect it with Microsoft Teams account or Gmail account so the reminders could go different ways so I connected with Pipedream's Gmail account and then like email address to configure I entered my email address and then I tested it and I received this weekly project hours reminder so this was pretty successful I was able to send the emails and then because it didn't link to the form I decided that I'm just going to reply back to it but basically that's one step you could do to include the form link and then it became kind of advanced at this point started showing me codes here successful send email for some reason I don't know why and that was pretty much it.

The next one is Zapier Zapier is happier that's how they say it Zapier make your workflows connect AI to nearly 8,000 tools without waiting for developers so this is pretty everybody knows Zapier they're very cool and they have this workflow tool and they are pretty old they have all these advanced features so Zapier was actually pretty good I went there I created a free account and then entered my prompt and then it started giving me options like how to do it should they fill out a form should they reply email should they use Slack so I really liked the options they were pretty good and then I received some errors but they were temporary so it was all good and I picked I believe I picked the email version and then it started working the similar way first it created the form for me it created this weekly project submission form project name hours worked and submit so this was pretty good and then one thing I liked is you can actually move between different pages between Zapier and the AI that's helping you the copilot that's helping you is holding your hand while you go from here to there and it doesn't forget about the project you're building so that was great because I think the initial project that I was building it didn't forget about it and it kept took me to the form builder took me to other parts of the site and just held my hand during these steps so now I'm in the workflow part so I'm building the workflow the Zaps and every week emails send out one email and yeah I sent a test demo to my emails and you can also customize the contents of the email like this and you can do test runs so that was also pretty good and looks like I didn't take a screenshot of the email but I also received the emails so this was Zapier I think it was the most successful one and A10 is pretty good but it's scary for everyday people it's kind of scary even the name A10 it could be scary for everyone basically A10 you don't get that prompt by default but if you open their Copilot the A10 AI you can enter it here so I entered my prompt and it created every Friday send an email and it actually created a form and connected to a database so this was actually pretty good like just doing what I wanted to do and then I was able to create my account Gmail account here connected with my Gmail account to be able to send emails and for the database it just created an internal database a projects table and I entered the project names manually so that they show up on the drop down so yeah I fixed those steps like the email and the database parameters and basically my form was ready I could enter my name email projects and hours like this submit my form and just test run using this execute button at the bottom and publish it and that was it I was able to create a form and just send weekly emails to remind send reminders and yeah that's pretty much it I know there are a couple list of items I think it seems like it took a couple minutes every single time but practically when I started building out the workflows that I used in make.com and stuff it took me a long time back when I originally did it and there wasn't really any AI help there I think one that maybe was missed from the more traditional ones was maybe make.com it has an AI builder now where you can type stuff out and get results but I actually couldn't find it I went to make couldn't find the AI part so I decided not to try them.

Hey do you want to showcase them?

Yeah for sure so there's a couple different ones that I have here just kind of pull them up for you uh-huh there we go here's an example of one so I just simply went to my Perplexity computer which for those of you that don't know Perplexity computer is essentially like a new agentic type of system that works off of a bunch of different AI models built by Perplexity and even uses other models that are not Perplexity oriented as you can see they actually just added Claude Opus 4.7 to the list here which is cool but basically I asked the exact same prompt and it basically did some research and told me this is a really interesting thing that you can do here's how you'd maybe go about doing it and then I said okay well that's great can you just walk me through a list of questions to build it out for me so a lot of different things with AI it simply takes you to ask it to give you more info and then you can maybe fill out some questions and it'll start making it so for the purposes of this here it gave me all these different questions like who needs to submit these updates should they get multiple requests if they're late for it reminder wise what should they fill out what data should be outputted in a report format and the different text stack type questions so I answered all the questions here really quick and then it showed me an example and built up the automated workflow to have something like this get sent back to me I just said make it basic make it easy have it send out these emails consistently and then I get a follow-up that ingests all of the different emails I get back and puts it into a spreadsheet for me now spreadsheets are perfectly cool here's the spreadsheet you can see right here here's an example spreadsheet that was built out from receiving the emails but that's obviously just one thing and this is pretty cool so it's just one example of what I can do with these different automated workflows you can make with AI tools and by the way the way that this is powered is I have a Gmail connector in here that automatically sends out emails and receives emails I made my own Python scripts in order to actually get it from multiple email sources for myself because I have multiple different emails that I use which is very cool but that's in that context now I have another example of this in a bit of a cooler I would say looking final outputs so if I go over to my Claude here Claude co-work and Claude and Claude code both have really cool schedule type stuff and here's another example of me putting the same prompt where I ask every Friday ask employees to send what projects they worked on so that during the week they can track their hours by project and then it says from who right similar thing and it creates a scheduled task as you can see that has all this in here that I can turn on and off it's an active automation that starts next Friday and if I press run now it will actually run and send it now if I go back here to what I just made give me a second all I did was answer the question asked who the people were it created the task and then the example output that I would receive in response is actually a little bit cooler a little bit cooler than just a basic spreadsheet I'd get weekly hours by project total team hours this amounts person and person and then it would actually break down in a chart amount of time that's been on both and then it had some categories and examples based off of what I would have received by an email beautiful yeah so this is literally made through a couple of typing like options and that's maybe all people need now maybe they don't need to go through a whole automated workflow granted the difference between setting this up and setting up what you set up is pretty marginal at this point I mean we have automations now in the simplest sense in platforms being able to be built with AI but tools that are able to do things for you now like Claude and Perplexity are allowing you to be able to set up automated doing things for you in their actual AI platforms too which is really cool.

Nice yeah those are some options and then just another one that I wanted to show for the purposes of this let me get Manas open so Manas is one that I play around with sometimes this is something that I actually have running on a recurring basis which is just I have this download folder that's a little bit unclean you see all these different folders that are in here yeah so what I had running on a recurring basis is I have Perplexity computer or not Perplexity computer Manas computer control my computer and when I say use Manas computer if I have this open in the background it'll run it I'm a little bit inconsistent with using it but I basically have some Python scripts and stuff like that working to automatically improve this so all of this type of stuff this really cluttered portion of things as you can see over time you can actually get automatically organized you know have different data different documents all organized within folders nice rather than it being all over the place which can be pretty useful and was literally a couple prompts away from me saying this is awful can you please organize this every day for me at like 5 p.m. and it's a different type of thing because it's not cloud-based it's more computer and on your actual hard drive space and then actually you know what real quick just to kind of show you some other ones that are good for Perplexity that are maybe a little different if I go here to new I go to scheduled I have a bunch of different ones going like I have one that takes my Grain recordings for recent calendar events so this basically connects to my calendar and it's something I set up once and then I don't have to worry about it again which it checks Grain which is an MCP connection that I have built already which is a meeting recorder and then it tracks the different tasks that were in the meeting and then adds it to my to do list which is another really cool one and these are all basically like my list of automations as you would manage as you would imagine it in the same way that you'd have in a list of automations on the workflows that you'd have in make.com or any then it's just where do you want to see it where do you want to do it I think a good example of it would be let me find another one so there's that one there's oh here we go so I have AI news pop up all the time right so this is from 4:17 here's some example LinkedIn posts for my own personal thing that talks about AI agent AI agent security it's just IT cosplay and so you add a harness and then I have my own team kind of work through the different trends of the day the different posts and then make something that looks a little bit better on my own actual LinkedIn and then from YouTube scripts and stuff like that so this is very much like where do you I what I just guess I want to get across out of it again is it's how do you want to slice it do you want to have it show up in your AI workflows for the different AI tools that you use do you want to have it in its your own in the automation builders it's kind of all up to what you want what you are interested in and yeah it's really great to kind of see it went so far from the original thing which was like you have to really know how to no code set this stuff up to you have to do it within the platform but it's easier to make and now you can just do it within an AI chat capability yeah I mean if you are like a small business and you have multiple people who need to be able to see the automations customize them you might prefer third-party tools where you can give access to other people that would be one advantage over just using Co-work I'm not sure if you can use Co-work with multiple people maybe there's a way to do it but I'm sure that they will probably add that in the future but it's pretty cool yeah yeah just to kind of wrap things up what do you think Jotform's new builder kind of sits to continue to take hold of the market and improve what it's doing to work together with the different things that are out there to make the best product possible?

Yeah I would say usually Jotform's workflows are more about organizational kind of automating organizational work you know small business education nonprofit healthcare when you have multiple people communicating doing work together it's helpful to use forms and we have so many active users on our workflow products so basically that's the kind of prompt we are seeing when we interview people use workflows the kind of things they do is more like that so that's why we are more focused on that area if you are kind of organizing people about those kind of forms and things like that our workflow products work really well and I think we have so much we can do on that one like just this for example the scheduling sending forms and then creating reports kind of thing it's very common thing we see among Jotform users so I think there's just so many products coming out I was looking at Product Hunt and I was seeing hundreds of products about workflows and people are beyond just going to ChatGPT and asking questions and getting answers they want to use AI to get their work done they want AI to do the work for them they want AI agents to work with AI workflow products and just give their work to them and once you start giving these work you just have to start to manage all these work happening you just showed us how many automations you have on Perplexity you had like 33 different scheduled automations so this tells me that in all these different automations you have to connect them you have to work them together so there's just so many challenges in this area but the technology is now making sense it's just possible and more and more people will start using it and that's why we are really excited about it there's just so much excitement for our workflow product in Jotform users so our first priority is to get it right for them make sure it works well for them make sure that the regular automations AI workflows that might work with forms we do really well and then the second step is inside these workflows how do you use AI how do we use AI well inside these automations how do we use AI agents within automations so we are going to focus on that area next but it's really exciting stuff definitely.

Yeah but it really is and I think it's going to be a constantly changing landscape that I'm excited to explore as time progresses and we continue to work together to explore these things on the podcast.

Definitely I mean in June when we released the latest version of AI Jotform work AI workflows we'll definitely do another episode and feature all the coming new features yeah.

Cool well with that being said I think it's a good place to close things out I appreciate each and every one of you for coming and watching this episode make sure that you check out everything that we're doing over here at Jotform with the new workflow stuff that we're building and with that being said thanks for watching and we'll see you in the next one see you next time.