AI agents are evolving fast, moving beyond simple embedded assistants to specific multi-task agents capable of handling complex business workflows. According to Gartner, 40% of enterprise applications will feature task-specific AI agents by 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. In other words, within a year, nearly every second business app will come with AI agents built in.
The time to start adopting them is now. In this guide, we’ll cut through all the “agentic” hype and walk you step by step through how to get started with AI agents — from setting clear business objectives to building your first agent and scaling with agentic platforms like Creatio.
Key Takeaways
- Inefficiency, manual workflows, complex decision-making, and escalating operational costs are clear signals it’s time to consider AI agents.
- To build effective AI agents, businesses should start with a clear understanding of their objectives and success metrics.
- To maximize impact, most organizations begin by creating role-specific AI agents (e.g., for sales, service, marketing or finance) that address high-value use cases.
- AI agent development no longer requires heavy coding — modern no-code agentic platforms like Creatio make it possible to design, deploy, and scale agents quickly.
Why Your Business Needs AI Agents?
Not all of today’s business challenges can be solved with traditional automation or human-only workflows. AI agents deliver real value by addressing some of the most pressing issues organizations face every day:
- Streamlining inefficient, manual workflows. AI agents take on repetitive, low-value tasks like updating records, routing requests, or checking data. By automating these processes end to end, they boost productivity and free employees to focus on higher-impact, strategic initiatives.
- Make faster, smarter decisions. Instead of spending hours compiling reports and analyzing them manually, AI agents process large volumes of diverse data in real time. They uncover patterns and recommend next-best actions, giving teams the insights they need to move quickly and respond with agility.
- Scaling operations without extra costs. Growth doesn’t have to mean more headcount. AI agents can automate hundreds of routine operations across departments, enabling businesses to scale efficiently while keeping costs under control and maintaining high performance.
According to PagerDuty’s Agentic AI survey, one in two companies has already deployed AI agents, and another 35% plan to do so within the next two years. As awareness of agentic AI grows, more businesses are embedding AI agents directly into their core processes.
Now, let’s explore how your organization can get started and build AI agents tailored to your needs.
5 Easy Steps to Get Started with AI Agents
Getting started with AI agents doesn’t have to be complicated. By breaking the process into clear, manageable steps, any business can move from exploration to execution without getting lost in technical details. The framework below will help you set the right goals, identify quick wins, and build powerful AI agents that grow with your organization.
Step 1: Define Your Business Objectives
When you start with measurable goals, you avoid building just a “fancy” AI agent that doesn’t add real value. A good rule of thumb: if a process is repetitive, time-consuming, and highlights inefficiencies — whether in revenue, customer experience, or employee workload — it’s a strong candidate for your first AI agent.
So before you dive in, be clear about what you want the agent to achieve. Is the goal to reduce customer service response times, qualify leads faster, or automate routine marketing tasks? Setting concrete objectives upfront ensures that each of your AI agents aligns with business priorities and delivers real ROI.
Step 2: Learn the AI Agent Use Cases
AI agents are most effective when configured for a specific business process and designed to amplify human teams and workflows. Instead of trying to apply them everywhere at once, look for functions where they can deliver quick, measurable wins that align with your goals.
Example of Creatio AI agent for Sales
Here are some common AI agents use cases across industries:
- Customer Service: prioritizing tickets, routing cases to the right department, handling FAQs, summarizing conversations, maintaining knowledge base, drafting initial responses.
- Sales Operations: qualifying leads, updating account records, generating follow-up emails, preparing sales quotes
- Marketing: segmenting audiences, personalizing campaign messages, designing campaign flows, generating performance reports.
- Finance: processing invoices, reconciling transactions, detecting anomalies or compliance risks, preparing month-end summaries.
- Operations & IT: workflow automation, incident triage, knowledge retrieval, troubleshooting steps for technical issues.
Exploring the common areas where AI agents are used will help you spot quick wins and high-value opportunities that your business can benefit from today. Start small, prove the value, and then expand into more complex areas.
Step 3: Understand How AI Agents Work
Before you start building an AI agent for sales, marketing, service or any other use case, it’s important to learn how the ai agents operate. Not only it’ll help you to understand how the process works behind the scenes, but also how to configure your ai agents to maximize their potential.
AI agents work by combining several components that allow them to understand, decide, and act. At the core are Large Language Models (LLMs), which interpret inputs and generate responses, guided by prompting that defines how the agent should behave. They use memory to keep track of context from past interactions, and draw on external knowledge such as company data, documents, or knowledge bases to provide accurate answers. Finally, through tools and integrations like APIs or business applications, AI agents can go beyond conversation to take real actions — for example, updating a CRM record, sending an email, or triggering a workflow.
The three essential ingredients that will help you to build an AI agent are:
- External knowledge that you want the agent to be able to use when answering, typically, your company’s data.
- Tools that you want the agent to act within, such as your CRM systems, or.
- Prompting to guide its behavior and ensure it performs tasks correctly.
For most organizations, the easiest and fastest way to put these ingredients together is by using agentic platforms. These platforms provide ready-to-use frameworks, intuitive interfaces, and pre-built integrations, so you don’t need an extensive technical knowledge or team of engineers to get started. Instead of building from scratch, you can build, test, and launch AI agents for various use cases.
Step 4: Explore the Agentic Platforms for Agent Development
To get started on your first ai agent, you don’t necessarily need to be a coding genious. Modern agentic platforms provide the infrastructure for building, deploying, and managing AI agents at scale. Look for platforms that offer:
When evaluating platforms, focus on these key criteria:
- Ease of use and flexibility. The platform should allow both business users and IT teams to create and configure agents without coding. Look for no-code builders, prebuilt templates, and prompt-based setup, as well as options to customize workflows and logic when needed.
- Seamless integrations. AI agents can perform only within your existing systems, so prioritize platforms that can be easily connected with CRM, ERP, service tools, and third-party apps. This way you’ll ensure that the agents can access data and perform tasks directly in your business processes.
- Governance and control. As AI agents take on complex and multi-step operations, oversight becomes essential. Prioritize platforms with dashboards to track performance, role-based permissions to manage access, and audit trails to ensure compliance and accountability.
- Scalability. As your list of use cases grows, the platform should make it easy to build and manage multiple agents across departments. Look for features like a no-code agent builder to rapidly launch new agents, dashboards to monitor usage and performance, and intuitive tools to coordinate your AI agents across workflows and maintain consistent performance at scale.
- Fast setup and easy updates. The ability to move from ideas to deployment quickly is critical. Select platforms that let you adjust logic, retrain models, and update agents with minimal effort so they can adapt to evolving business needs.
Choosing a platform with these capabilities ensures you can start quickly, scale efficiently, and keep your AI agents aligned with business goals over time. Platforms like Creatio make it possible for business and IT teams to collaborate and deliver agents quickly without heavy coding. Agentic platforms like Creatio combine all these elements in one no-code environment, enabling faster deployment and easier management of enterprise-grade AI agents.
Step 5: Create, Scale and Continuously Improve Your Agents
Start small by launching your first AI agent around a single, high-value use case you prioritized in Step 2. Measure outcomes against your business objectives and refine performance using platform dashboards and team feedback. Even small adjustments in prompts, workflows, or data connections can deliver significant improvements — so ongoing testing is key.
Once you’ve proven value, start creating vertical AI agents across departments. A strong platform will let you run multiple agents in parallel, for instance, sales, marketing, service, or operations, and orchestrate them using a single interface. With regular updates and refinements, your agents stay aligned with evolving business needs, building into a network of AI-driven workflows that scales alongside your business.
Build Your First AI Agent with Creatio’s Agentic Platform
Creatio is the only no-code agentic platform built specifically for CRM and workflow automation — combining applications and AI agents in a single environment. It allows both business users and domain experts design, launch, and scale AI agents quickly, without the extensive coding or stitching together multiple tools.
With the No-Code Agent Builder, users can visually compose skills, logic, and knowledge into fully functional AI agents using natural language by adding specific instructions, limitations, actions, and supporting resources. These agents integrate seamlessly with your CRM, business applications, and third-party tools to automate everything from repetitive service requests to cross-functional workflows. For even more flexibility, Creatio’s Marketplace offers 700+ connectors, apps, and integrations to extend agent capabilities without heavy development.
Creatio’s AI-powered no-code approach dramatically reduces development time and complexity. According to Nucleus Research, Creatio can be implemented 70% than legacy systems, delivering rapid time-to-value and stronger ROI. To help teams start faster, Creatio provides prebuilt AI agents for Marketing, Sales, and Service, which come as a part of its CRM products and ready to deliver value from day one.
To ensure transparency and control, the AI Command Center lets you centrally manage all agents and skills, with full visibility into usage, performance, and access. This gives organizations the governance and scalability needed to confidently expand AI adoption.
Whether your goal is to streamline customer service, qualify leads faster, generate quotes, or orchestrate complex workflows, Creatio gives you the best tools to ou need to build and scale enterprise-grade AI agents with ease.
Creatio AI Agents
Deploy custom AI agents for your business - faster with Creatio's no-code
Summary
While earlier AI agents required deep coding expertise, today creating custom agents is easier and far more accessible. By starting with clear objectives, identifying the right use cases, and understanding how agents work, companies can quickly move from theory to practical results. With the right agentic platform, building AI agents no longer requires specialized technical skills — it becomes an ultimate way to automate repetitive tasks, boost team productivity, and unlock new efficiencies across departments.
As the only no-code agentic platform built for CRM and workflow automation, Creatio makes this journey simple and way more effective. It enables both business and IT teams to design, launch, and manage AI agents with ease, or get started quickly using prebuilt CRM agents for sales, marketing, and service. The result is a scalable, secure, and high-ROI way to adopt AI agents that are tailored to your unique business needs.
