A free guide by Stu Jordan
What Is an Agent?
A plain guide to what an agent could do for you, and which part of it you'd own.
Start reading
A plain guide to what an agent could do for you, and which part of it you'd own.
Start readingAn agent is AI that does the work for you. You tell it what you want in ordinary words, the way you'd brief an assistant who knows your business. It goes and gets it done, then brings the work back to you. Nothing goes out until you've seen it.
In your week, that could be the follow-up after a call, a quote built from your prices, a letter, or the notes you need before a meeting. It could also be a polite nudge about something overdue or a first draft of your next post. You can hand it a few of these at once and get on with something else while it works. When it's done, you read what it made and tell it what to change.
When you use ChatGPT like a chatbot, you ask it a question, get an answer, and then do the rest of the work yourself. An agent can take a goal and carry out the job.
You decide what needs to happen. The agent works through how to get it done.
Every agent worth having is made of the same four things, and each one changes what it can do for you.
It knows what you sell, who you sell it to, what you charge and how you like things done. A good agent learns this from material you already have, like your price list and emails you were happy with. Then it asks you about anything that's missing.
It keeps track of what you're working on and what you've decided, so it picks up where you left off. When you correct it, it keeps the correction.
It can use the apps you already work in, like your email, calendar and documents, and it can look things up on the web. That's what lets it do the job itself. You choose which apps it can reach, and your agent walks you through connecting each one.
Your agent works in the ChatGPT app, or Claude from Anthropic, on a paid plan. It uses the desktop app on your computer, because that's the version that can work with your files.
Take one of these away and you end up doing that part yourself, like copying things between apps or reminding it what you decided last week. With all four, it can do the work itself.
Anyone who pays for ChatGPT or Claude gets the same AI model, which is the part that does the thinking. It gets smarter every few months. What turns it into your agent is what it knows about your business and how it works for you. That means your customers and prices, the way you write, what you decided last week and the corrections you've made.
Because it keeps what you teach it, the agent you have in six months will know your business far better than the one you started with.
That part is yours. It's kept in a folder on your computer as documents you can open and read, so you can always see what your agent knows. To change something, you tell it in the chat.
You also choose the app. The same agent works in ChatGPT or Claude. When a smarter model comes out, it can use it straight away, with everything it already knows.
Your agent works to rules written in words you can read, and it reads them at the start of every chat. You can change any of them by telling it what you want.
You choose which of your apps it can reach and what it may do in each one. It might read your inbox and write replies as drafts, or read your calendar to get you ready for a meeting, and leave the sending to you.
The folder stays on your computer. When your agent works on a job, the app sends what that job needs to the AI model, the same way ChatGPT handles anything you type into it. Anything you haven't let it reach stays out of that, so confidential records can stay off its list.
Every good agent works to one rule: anything you can't undo waits for you. Your agent writes the email, and you send it. It prepares the quote, and you decide whether it goes out.
Sometimes it won't get it right, and the fix is usually a sentence in the chat.
You can also rule things out completely, like spending money or deleting your files.
If you'd like an agent of your own, Build Your First Business Agent is my class and kit for exactly that.
The kit is a step-by-step page. You paste one line from it into a chat in the ChatGPT or Claude desktop app, and your agent puts its own files into a folder on your computer. Then it interviews you about your business. The class recording shows every step on screen, and the kit comes with briefs for 25 everyday jobs you can hand it.
It works in ChatGPT or Claude, and you own it.
$199 USD. You'll need the ChatGPT or Claude desktop app on a paid plan, and ChatGPT Plus or Claude Pro is enough. It runs on Windows or a Mac, and it's built for people without a technical background.