The artificial intelligence boom has sparked the development and mainstream adoption of many related products and tools such as large language models (ie. ChatGPT) that can provide a variety of services for humans to boost productivity cost-effectively.
In particular, one such area that has gone relatively unnoticed but that has started to gain more traction is the usage of AI agents. They also have the potential to synergize with blockchain technology and solve certain issues related to payments, data storage, and more.
For this reason, this blog will further explore the basic details of AI agents, their benefits, and current challenges.
Key Takeaways
- AI agents are system programs that use computer models to operate in the real world, assess decision-making factors, solve problems, and carry out tasks on behalf of humans who provide objectives and environments.
- AI agents can provide many meaningful advantages, such as better efficiency and consistency, maximizing productivity, cost-effectiveness, and integration with other emerging technologies.
- There are also some risks and challenges in deploying AI agents, including untrustworthy training data, improper development, lack of transparency, and potential regulations.
- AI agents also have the potential to synergize with blockchain technology and solve certain issues related to payments, data storage, and more.
What are AI Agents?
Going beyond just language processing, AI agents are system programs that utilize computer models, such as neural networks, large language models, and others, to operate in the real world, assess decision-making factors, solve problems, and carry out tasks and actions on behalf of humans who provide objectives and environments.
The initial details and goals are set by the humans for their AI agents to independently achieve by analyzing the best actions to take, such as information acquisition, task implementation, data collection, etc.
For example, there could be dedicated customer service AI agents developed by a company to comprehensively assist its support staff by interacting autonomously with real customers, responding to various inquiries, looking up relevant information to provide detailed assistance, and also communicating specific customer needs to staff personnel when warranted.
There can be many different types of AI agents depending on certain business needs and demands, with some being more basic than others and some being able to perform much more advanced reasoning and complex learning.
Related reading:
- How blockchain is solving issues with the usage of AI tools
- What learning about emerging technologies can do for your career
- Why you need to start learning blockchain now
Benefits of AI Agents
Due to their ability to become smarter and learn over time through data collection, their advanced technological properties, and their relative cost-effectiveness to deploy, several major benefits can be gained by companies choosing to train and use AI agents. This enables companies to better manage their resources and costs, drive business growth, and reap productivity gains.
Some advantages of AI agents include:
- Better efficiency and consistency: AI agents can tackle repetitive and tedious tasks more efficiently than humans, freeing people to do more important creative work that adds value to businesses. By gathering data from their experiences and environments, AI agents can become more intelligent and deliver more efficient, consistent outcomes based on large amounts of data analysis.
- Maximize productivity: AI agents can operate 100% of the time without breaks, holidays, or vacation time.
- Cost-effectiveness: AI agents train and get smarter over time by learning from their experiences, leading to better decision-making and analytical skills. They also can work on a variety of tasks using automation which reduces the risk of common human errors and removes the need for allocating huge resources for certain tasks.
- Integration with other emerging technologies: AI agents are trained and developed by human developers and their experiences. Their customization ability enables them to develop potential integration capabilities with other emerging technologies, such as blockchain and digital assets to provide more functionalities and features in the long run.
There are several other benefits, but this would extend the discussion much further. The basic examples offered should be enough to show how these AI agents can provide many meaningful advantages.
Some Challenges
As with any new technology, there are also some risks and challenges in deploying AI agents, including:
- Untrustworthy training data: The information used to train the AI agent could be poor, corrupted, or erroneous, leading to misinformed decisions that can negatively affect a business.
- Improper development: Human developers could provide erroneous inputs and goals, making the desired results unclear. If the agent is not designed correctly, it can give poor results even if the training data is appropriate.
- Lack of transparency: AI agents that are not open source are difficult to audit. Their behavior can be challenging to adjust, and it can be difficult to understand why they do certain things. Governments can also regulate and make data collection and storage methods transparent.
- Potential regulations: Due to its nascent nature, once AI agents and businesses start to incorporate more of its technology into business products and services, governments might start to increasingly regulate them, necessitating technological changes that can be potentially costly.
NMKR and Masumi Protocol: Using Blockchain to Optimize AI Agents
NMKR is a tokenization service leveraging the Cardano blockchain, enabling businesses and individual creators to utilize its platform and tools to tokenize assets.
Now, they have started to partner with other entities in merging the worlds of blockchain and AI agents through the Masumi Protocol, which aims to solve some of the challenges faced by AI agents.
For instance, in addition to the challenges noted above, there are other unresolved problems with most current AI models that are deployed for consumer usage, including:
- A lack of verification: Many AI agents and tools are available for free or require some sort of payment using a “freemium” model to onboard new users, requiring them to hand over private personal data to receive access. This can cause privacy concerns for certain users who may not know how their personal information is being stored and used by unverified parties or the agents themselves.
- Lack of transactional capability: Many AI tools have limited abilities to transact with each other. Transactional capability will become a necessity as they become “smarter,” and more adopted commercially.
By integrating blockchain technology and related tools, Masumi provides an identity to transparently record and verify a particular AI agent, helping with any fraudulent services. It also creates a record of where the AI agent got its information to provide an answer. Finally, it allows agents to make safe transactions with other agents that can be audited and configured to be safe.
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You should not construe any such information or other material as legal, tax, investment, financial, or other advice. Nothing contained herein shall constitute a solicitation, recommendation, endorsement, or offer by EMURGO to invest.
