Real agents for sales, marketing, support, operations, finance, HR and product — what starts each one, the steps it takes, the tools it uses, and where a person stays in the loop.
An AI agent is software that takes a goal and a set of tools and decides its own steps. Examples: a lead qualifier that scores every inbound lead, a support bot that answers from your help docs, a ticket triager, an SEO auditor, an invoice processor and a pull request reviewer. Below are 50 examples by department, each with its trigger, steps, tools and the point where a person approves.
Sales AI agent examples
1. Inbound lead qualifier
Scores every new inbound lead against your ideal customer profile and routes the good ones to a rep within minutes.
Starts on: Webhook from your form
1. Reads the form answers and the company's website
An AI agent is software that is given a goal and a set of tools, and decides for itself which steps to take to reach the goal. Where a rule-based automation follows the same fixed steps every time, an agent reads the situation — an email, a lead, a ticket — and chooses what to do next.
Common examples include lead qualifiers that score inbound leads, support bots that answer from your help docs, ticket triagers, SEO auditors, invoice processors, candidate screeners and pull request reviewers. This page lists 50, grouped by department, each with its trigger, steps, tools and the point where a person approves.
An automation runs the same steps every time ("when a form is submitted, add a row"). An agent decides the steps on each run ("read this lead, research the company, decide whether it fits, then route it"). Use an automation when every case is the same; use an agent when each case needs judgement.
Start with an agent that reads and sorts but does not send anything: an inbound lead qualifier, a support ticket triager or a weekly report. They save time from day one, and you can check their work before you let any agent act on its own.
Only with a checkpoint. In the examples on this page, any action that sends, publishes, pays or deletes waits for a person to approve the exact content first. Reading, researching and drafting run without one.
Build one of these without code
Start from a template in the agent library, or describe the job and let the agent creator set it up.