Mind Readings: How to Prepare Your Business for AI Agents

In today's episode, let's talk about getting ready for the AI agent revolution. What is this? What are we talking about? AI agents are pieces of software that are designed to conduct uh very complicated tasks autonomously. Uh so for example, you might have an AI agent that you turn on, maybe it's an app on your phone, and you say, book me a flight from Boston to Nashville on this date, find uh your budget is $500, no more than that, go and do it.

And these are the dates. And the agent will open a web browser, figure out with the airline or the flight chooser, sort through it all the criteria that you um you ask it, might ask questions like, hey, do you want nonstop? Do you want a window seat and ILC? You have to work with it. And then it just goes and does the thing, right?

You might say, Hey agent, go buy me uh a pack of Q tips on Amazon. It goes and does the thing, right? And it it has the ability to access your existing uh data and work with it. That's what an agent does. And these are going to be really, really prominent in the next couple years because they just make life easier, right?

They make life a lot easier. If you say to an agent, you know, get me a uh get me an appointment at the car dealership to get my car inspected, whatever. It will go and do the thing. And there's going to be two kinds of agents. Uh, one is the sort of the buyer's agent, right?

This is kind of like the with a real estate in a way. Uh, there's a buyer's agent, which might be something like uh the smart assistant on your phone, and there's a seller's agent, uh, something that would be like a chat bot on a website. If you've ever gone to a website these days and you just talk to the chat bot, of course, you know, schedule appointment or whatever, that's essentially, what a seller's agent would be like. And they'll be able to talk to each other. So, like the whole well, have my people call your people and we'll uh we'll do a lunch.

Um, what do you need to do? As a business, the first simplest and most useful thing you can do to get ready for the AI agent revolution is this. Make your website accessible. Here's why. Most agents, at least the ones today, are written in Python.

Python has a number of web drivers like Selenium, Chromium, uh BeautifulSoup, etc. These are pieces of software that can autonomously browse websites. They browse it through mainly text. So if you were to use a screen reader, for example, on a website, it would look a lot like or a text-based web browser. It'll look a lot like what these uh code-based web browsers look like and what they do.

Which means that if your site is accessible and it has accommodations, particularly for the visually impaired, agents will be able to work with it better. Python code invokes the the Selenium browser, Selenium browser opens up the text version of your website and tries to figure out what to do. And it will work better if it doesn't have to you know render the web page and do all sorts of crazy stuff, execute JavaScript. No, if it's if it's works well with a screen reader, it'll work well with an AI agent. And so if you want to get ahead of the curve today, you want to get ready for the AI agent revolution whenever it happens, if it's 2024, 2026, 2030, who cares?

Do it today. Get your website fully accessible today, and you'll win. Right? You'll win. Because guess what?

In addition to being ready for AI agents, if and when they come around, you're also reopening your website to people who are using accommodation technology, accessibility technology today. And that can be 10, 15, 20% of your website traffic, maybe more, depending on the audience you serve. If you have people who are using screen readers, if you have people who are using uh who are neurodivergent and just don't want to read and they say, read this web page to me. Again, that's a tool that's going to go and look at the text on the page. If it is accessible, if it is compliant with accessibility uh recommendations and best practices, today's technology will work better with your website.

You will deliver a better result. And as a result, you will get more business today. So it's it's a win for today. It's a win for a population that you're probably not serving as well as you could be, and it's a win for tomorrow when AI agents are doing this on other people's behalf. You want to be ready today.

So go and do that. Uh, if you need some resources, uh, go check out um the Perkins Accessibility Project uh led by the Perkins uh institute, and they have a ton of great resources. I'm uh an accessibility something or other person with them. Um, but they have a ton of great free resources for ways to make your your website and your digital properties more accessible. That's gonna do it for today's episode.

Thanks for tuning in. Talk to you next time. If you enjoyed this video, please hit the like button. Subscribe to my channel if you haven't already, and if you want to know when new videos are available, hit the bell button to be notified as soon as new content is live.