Transcript
Hey, how's it going? Hope you're having a great day. I want to talk about workflows and agentic workflows and how you can actually integrate them inside of your website and very specifically the ones that are very high value with very low effort. Because this should be basically like a gateway drug for you getting into, you know, the agentic stuff and everything else. You've probably rolled your eyes by now, but it's very, very important. And I think you should be using it today because I think there's going to be a huge amount of companies that are going to dwarf the efforts of other companies with being able to basically leverage AI.
So let's start. What do we currently use and what is valuable with our particular business? Well, we use a form enrichment system. So whenever somebody submits a form on our website, it takes the name, it takes the domain name that comes out of the email and it takes the message to understand intent and it creates a whole research chatbot that goes off and basically uses a bunch of tools to read the information from that particular client and come back and give me a complete synopsis of why they're getting in touch, whether they're a good fit, all these different informations, you know, financials, whether it's a series A round, series B round, all that kind of stuff. So that's really really valuable.
Now, how do you do that? And how would you get that running as fast as possible? Well, you're probably going to be using something like HubSpot or Salesforce. HubSpot is an interesting one. Depending on which plan you have, but there are a whole bunch of different trade-offs that are involved in there, whereas Salesforce is very very easy to do this with. But basically, you would stick it in between those two endpoints and you would make sure that it basically runs.
Now, how do you know this is going to run consistently? Because that is a problem of its own. Well, I'll tell you about the most underutilized thing that I know of that Vercel has, which is this tool called workflows or the use workflow development kit. It's right here. Now, what does make any TypeScript function durable mean? I don't know when I first looked at this, nor did anybody on my team know. Let me tell you what this actually means, because it's so much simpler when you know that it basically means that no matter what happens, this generally doesn't break. It will take another go at whatever it is doing.
So in the particular context that we're talking about here, if for example the AI responded with an incorrect system, so like it basically gave you an error when it came back, it would try again maybe three times before it basically failed. Or for example, it tried going to an API and the API wasn't available at that particular time. It can just basically go again and wait and go again. Even more impressive is that it can wait for a tremendous amount of time. So you could very easily say, "Go ping this after 5 minutes. Go ping this after 10 minutes. Okay, that didn't work. Go ping this after 3 weeks." It's really that functional. So like it will go that length of time.
Now, if you're a developer, you've probably just heard what I've said and thought, "Oh, wow. How do they keep it running for three weeks or a month or six months?" I don't know. Frankly, I don't know how they do it. It's magic. It works though and it's really, really incredible. And you can do some incredible onboarding flows with this particular technique. It's just that people aren't using it right now. And I think these companies that are going to use it are going to absolutely blow other companies out of the water.
So this is just basically some of the code. We can give some advice as to how to build these things for the first time. But the best way to just start working with it is to use something that somebody else has built, which is the lead agent. So this thing right here is something that Vercel has open-sourced and it is a perfect example very similar to what we were talking about where it is an inbound lead qualification tool that uses your own data set. So you can actually put your own data warehouse in here or whatever tools you're using to enrich that particular lead that comes through.
Now, this is a pretty big form. And I'm not the biggest fan of having to fill out quite substantial forms, but this shows you how the architecture works. And you can see, you know, user submits form. This starts the workflow. So, again, the workflow development kit here. And then the research agent goes off using AI's SDK. Again, the AI's SDK qualify lead. You can have your own thing. And this is the reason why it's so powerful. Once you've built this functionality, you can tweak it exactly to your business rather than having to use predefined tools that already exist that are kind of like a one-size-fits-all. It's the difference between tailoring a shirt that you know is going to look really really nice versus buying one off of the rail and it kind of looks all right, but it's a bit boxy and it looks a bit weird. That's what we're currently used to with all these different SaaS solutions. This is the custom-tailored looking really really nice when you actually wear it.
So yeah, that's the difference here. And again, this is just using the Vercel architecture. I would really heavily advise using Vercel. Not because I'm getting paid for this, but because we just use it. And every time we use Vercel, there is no headaches with anything that we build. It's just really, really efficient.
And one thing that's really particularly nice about this demo in particular is the Slack bot that comes involved in it. So the Slack uses Bolt, which is a brand new library for Slack. I think it was released like three months ago from memory. But it's a way of Vercel basically putting this adapter that sits between those two toolings. I'm going to check this. I'm going to fact-check that this is a new tool from Slack, but I'm fairly certain it is.
And you might be wondering with all of this, this is all sounding great so far. But surely putting our conversions and things like that inside of here is a very easy way for data to leak and we should start worrying about that kind of like that information going out. Well, that is where Sandbox SDK comes in. So this in particular is usually used for if people are going to try executing code and doing things and trying to stop people from wiping stuff. But there is a whole host of different ways to ensure that your data doesn't leak from this AI agent. There are a lot of them built in. Vercel basically builds into this whole tooling. But this is one that if you want to do more complicated stuff is very very valuable.
And now I'm hoping your brain's spinning with a whole bunch of different things that you might want to do with your own form. But if not, I'll give you a couple more suggestions that are very very useful that I would consider doing right now and we are doing internally for different clients and for ourselves.
So internationalization is a massive one. Internationalization used to be so so expensive to do, and now it's gone down to pennies. So you can use tools like Languin, which is fantastic to be able to pass it back in markdown or pass it back in a whole different range of different file types, or you can integrate with AI itself to just rewrite pages and give you a great first draft.
And talking of first drafts, there's another option that you can do with this, which is if you're trying to do content velocity, you know, you need to put out blogs and you find yourself kind of bottlenecked by the number of marketers that you have on your team. Well, the great thing you can do is you can actually generate on a cron job. So when it goes off like once every week, it fires five different drafts off based on something like, say for example in our particular field, you might do it based on X posts like X kind of trending things or something like Hacker News. You can base those and create a bunch of different blog posts. So you can generate the first draft of say five blog posts every week at 9:00 a.m. UK or 9:00 a.m. US, whatever. That's something you can do with this particular tool. You can feed that into Sanity or Contentful or any other headless content management system that allows you to make API calls.
And then finally, probably another one that's really really useful that we see, some people are offering this as a SaaS, but you might want it internally, which is you might want to create an internal chatbot from the company information wherever that is kept. If that's in a data warehouse or if that's kept in, for example, markdown or it's kept inside of Sanity or an API. Getting all that information together and being able to query that information fast is like the fastest way to onboard new people to the team. That's all possible with everything that we've just talked about.
So if any of these things sound particularly interesting, get in touch. We're going to do a few more demos in the future where we talk about how to actually build these and show a lot more development environments. So if you like this, do us a favor. Give us the thumbs up or subscribe or whatever it is that people usually say at the end of these videos. Anyway, thank you ever so much for listening. Take care. Have a great day. Bye-bye.
