Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: K.
Danny Fellars: With that, Ali is gonna walk us through, AI agents and how they work, how to build them, how to trigger them, all the fun stuff on AI agents.
Danny Fellars: Let's create yours.
Danny Fellars: Remove mine.
Danny Fellars: And then yours is there we go.
Kamille Parks: K.
Kamille Parks: Alright.
Alli Alosa: Okay.
Alli Alosa: So we're gonna do a whole deep dive, as Dan said, on field agents.
Alli Alosa: I've been using them a lot more recently, especially now that Airtable has added, a couple new features to really be able to more finely control when these fields are triggered, etcetera, which we'll get into a little bit, later.
Alli Alosa: But first, I'm just gonna start with what are they, why would you use them, when should you use them, etcetera.
Alli Alosa: So a field agent is basically, it's like a mini AI agent within your database.
Alli Alosa: Within each table, you could have a field set up as an agent.
Alli Alosa: And with one of the more it used to be that the, like, long text fields, it was I think that was the only output at first.
Alli Alosa: You would only you you would insert a prompt into the field configuration, and it would give you back text.
Alli Alosa: And then you could use that and configure it how you wanted later on with, like, a formula maybe.
Alli Alosa: But then they've since added a bunch more different outputs, which have made them a lot more useful, and they've added more fine controls.
Alli Alosa: So we can talk about, a really simple example, which would be, like, this company size field.
Alli Alosa: And, actually, what I was one point I was trying to make previously is that one thing you couldn't do is if you had it the output set up to be, you know, an AI enabled field, you couldn't edit that output.
Alli Alosa: It was only the AI could edit it.
Alli Alosa: But now you can kinda work in tandem in the same field with AI.
Alli Alosa: So I've actually found that to be really nice, because I don't wanna have two different fields set up to be like, I maintain this one and the agent maintains the other.
Alli Alosa: I'd rather have just the one field.
Alli Alosa: And now that's possible, so that's been really useful.
Alli Alosa: So let's we could talk about just changing this one to be an AI field, which we can say convert with this button right here.
Alli Alosa: Certain field types will not allow this.
Alli Alosa: Only the ones that have the output already, that are compatible with an agent, will allow that.
Alli Alosa: And those you can find here by going to creating a custom agent, and you can select the type here and see what the output types are that are available to you.
Alli Alosa: So quite a lot now, which is amazing.
Alli Alosa: So let's talk about converting this one first.
Alli Alosa: I guess we'll start actually, let's see.
Alli Alosa: I'm like, maybe we should actually just start from the top really quick and just say, like, let's do a long text one.
Alli Alosa: We'll select long text at the top.
Alli Alosa: And for this example, I have companies and industries.
Alli Alosa: We could kinda go with, like, a market research vibe for our use case.
Alli Alosa: So I'm going to insert in here a prompt to let's grab, like, a recent news article summarize a recent news article about the company in this, in each record.
Alli Alosa: One thing you can do, which is also cool, is you can use this edit with AI button to, like, help it help it write your prompt as well, which is nice.
Alli Alosa: I rarely ever use that, but I think it probably would be useful.
Alli Alosa: Do you guys use that ever, Dan and Kamille?
Kamille Parks: It's disabled for for every Airtable account I have.
Alli Alosa: There you go.
Danny Fellars: I I have used it.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Danny Fellars: I've also, like, sometimes I'll just have Claude open and have Claude generate my prompt.
Alli Alosa: Certainly.
Alli Alosa: I'm finding more and more that, I wanna try that app that I believe it was Rob was talking about, Whisperflow.
Alli Alosa: Is that the one that everyone where you can just Yep.
Danny Fellars: I use that.
Danny Fellars: Yeah.
Alli Alosa: I'm, like, I'm typing so much more now that I'm writing all these prompts.
Alli Alosa: I'm like, oh my goodness.
Alli Alosa: That's the pain of everyone right now dealing with AI.
Alli Alosa: But I'm going to tell it to research the company online and find the most recent news article, summarize the article, and include the date and source slash publication name.
Alli Alosa: And then what I'm going to do, I need to tell it within this prompt what the company is.
Alli Alosa: So depending on how I'm actually writing my prompt, I might do this in many different ways.
Alli Alosa: But sometimes I just do, you know, name value pairs at the bottom.
Alli Alosa: Just say company colon, this is the company name, website, and you can type an at symbol or a squiggly bracket to pull up this picker.
Kamille Parks: Two things.
Kamille Parks: Why is it an at instead of, curly braces like, the Right.
Kamille Parks: Formula editor or roll up editor?
Kamille Parks: And why does the, URL say new?
Kamille Parks: Is that a new field that you added to the base, or is that, like, it couldn't collect information from a URL type field before and now it can?
Alli Alosa: That's a really good question.
Alli Alosa: Okay.
Alli Alosa: I didn't even pick up on it until you said it.
Alli Alosa: I, like, no.
Alli Alosa: It could always take URL type fields.
Kamille Parks: It has since day one.
Kamille Parks: I don't I don't know.
Kamille Parks: I
Alli Alosa: I I'm not sure.
Alli Alosa: That is it is a field that I added last, but I added I add it was last night.
Alli Alosa: I don't know.
Alli Alosa: Okay.
Kamille Parks: Well, I do like the pop up though for selecting a field.
Kamille Parks: I wish the formula editor had that.
Kamille Parks: It's it looks like it's easier to navigate than the thing that formulas
Alli Alosa: have.
Alli Alosa: Absolutely.
Alli Alosa: And when we get into deep match too, it's pretty cool.
Alli Alosa: Like, it'll show you both tables that you're looking at when it's a linked record field.
Alli Alosa: That's I find really useful.
Alli Alosa: One thing, you can use the squiggly or the at symbol.
Alli Alosa: And, yes, I don't know why randomly now at is the thing that they're using, but silly.
Alli Alosa: So let's just create this and see what happens.
Alli Alosa: We'll talk about the thing at the bottom in a moment.
Alli Alosa: I'm gonna say recent news.
Alli Alosa: Oh, and, also, I need to enable it to search the web.
Alli Alosa: That's one thing that, I do actually have it enabled.
Alli Alosa: That's what this little icon means.
Alli Alosa: But I do believe this is a setting that you might not have on by default, so do make sure that you look at this.
Alli Alosa: If you don't have it on, then you wouldn't see that little icon there.
Alli Alosa: But you need to give it that tool to be able to actually go and look at the Internet to find news about the article I mean, about the company.
Alli Alosa: One thing I don't love is that when you create it, it will run for the first 10 records even though you don't have on automatic generation.
Alli Alosa: But, I guess, I mean, it's cool to get a sample set, but still, it's like I didn't ask you to do that.
Alli Alosa: Okay.
Kamille Parks: Yet yet another limited number I must memorize now.
Kamille Parks: It'll do the first 10.
Alli Alosa: Yep.
Alli Alosa: Yep.
Kamille Parks: Okay.
Kamille Parks: Interesting.
Alli Alosa: So suddenly sometimes I will, you know, look at the output and say, okay.
Alli Alosa: Well, I don't need it to start with the most recent news article about blah blah blah.
Alli Alosa: Like so I will then keep editing my prompt to be like, okay.
Alli Alosa: And you get better at this over time, and you think about what to write the first time.
Alli Alosa: So if I were, you know, gonna edit this, I might say, okay.
Alli Alosa: Here's what your out output should look like.
Alli Alosa: You should start with the date, then on the next line, have the publication name, then the summary of the article, then the link to it, etcetera.
Alli Alosa: So you can guide it along what you want for your output.
Alli Alosa: But to talk a little bit about how I might keep this field up to date.
Alli Alosa: That would have been a little bit more difficult in the past, and it's now a little bit more easy.
Alli Alosa: So let's walk through a couple examples of that.
Alli Alosa: In the past, really, the only option you had was to toggle on this automatic generation.
Alli Alosa: And what that means is that anytime any value that you're using in this prompt, any field that you're referencing, anytime a value in that field changes or is updated, this will also retrigger and rerun.
Alli Alosa: Your prompt will refire again, so the agent will keep regenerating new content.
Alli Alosa: And especially if you have, like, a long text field that you're referencing in this field, if you're if you had a description field, I don't know about the company, and you were using that in here.
Alli Alosa: As you're typing in that description field, like, it's committing your values out upon keystroke.
Alli Alosa: So every couple letters you type, this is re triggering, and it's wasting all your tokens and all your credits.
Alli Alosa: So that was a mess and really easy to do and not realize that you're doing.
Alli Alosa: I, for that reason, very, very rarely ever toggle on automatic generation, unless it's something that I know is, like, a one and done.
Alli Alosa: It's gonna like, the record's gonna show up.
Alli Alosa: I need it to run, and it just never no one's gonna touch it again.
Alli Alosa: I don't know.
Alli Alosa: There are ways to retrigger it without having this on, So I'm gonna talk about that next.
Alli Alosa: I I highly recommend doing it this way just because I I like to have full control over when my credits are being used.
Alli Alosa: So under this additional triggers section, we have a few options.
Alli Alosa: At first, I was like, I really feel like there's something missing from this, and I I I still think there is.
Alli Alosa: I think they should have a do not run if, like, always, in here.
Alli Alosa: You can still kind of simulate that as well, which I'm gonna kind of do as well.
Alli Alosa: We'll show you how that works too.
Alli Alosa: But there are two options.
Alli Alosa: You can run on a schedule.
Alli Alosa: So I could say, alright.
Alli Alosa: I want this to run every weekday, and that might be a really good use case for this exact field.
Alli Alosa: Right?
Alli Alosa: I want every day find the news of the day about this company, and have it refresh, you know, weekdays at 9AM.
Alli Alosa: Great.
Alli Alosa: Like, that would be perfect.
Alli Alosa: You can also add a condition to that schedule to be like, okay.
Alli Alosa: Only refresh on that weekday if yeah.
Alli Alosa: I don't know.
Alli Alosa: If we had a status field like tracking or not tracking this company, you could turn it off.
Alli Alosa: So you can ignore certain records from that schedule, which I do find useful as well.
Alli Alosa: But that would be probably a really good use case for this.
Alli Alosa: We need to set that up on a schedule.
Alli Alosa: I would save that then.
Alli Alosa: And then you can also say I wanna refresh it on command.
Alli Alosa: Let's hit save, and then I'll actually just show you how to do this.
Alli Alosa: You can run the agent again manually per record.
Alli Alosa: You could hit this refresh button and have it search the web again.
Alli Alosa: You can also right click on the field header and run the field agent, and it gives you several different options.
Alli Alosa: Some of which I find I feel, again, I feel like they're are are missing.
Alli Alosa: Like, I don't I don't really find many of these useful.
Alli Alosa: Usually, I'm saying, okay.
Alli Alosa: Either all in the view or the ones I've never modified.
Alli Alosa: Those two, I think, are are useful.
Alli Alosa: But, like, if I had this grouped, for example, like, I would like to be able to, like, I don't know, run it for one group at a time or something like that.
Alli Alosa: That would be useful.
Alli Alosa: But I don't know.
Danny Fellars: It is I wish, like, you could check the group.
Danny Fellars: There'd be a checkbox on the grouping heading, and that would check all, then you could do run selected.
Kamille Parks: That is that's yes.
Kamille Parks: Thank you.
Kamille Parks: The checkbox too.
Kamille Parks: Checkbox does nothing.
Kamille Parks: I would that should be it should be
Alli Alosa: three selected records.
Alli Alosa: I should see that as an option.
Alli Alosa: You know?
Danny Fellars: I thought it was I misread that.
Alli Alosa: I wish.
Kamille Parks: Is could you rerun the agent from an automation?
Kamille Parks: Is that a thing?
Alli Alosa: No.
Alli Alosa: But you can.
Alli Alosa: That's what I'm gonna simulate right now.
Alli Alosa: Okay.
Alli Alosa: So what I would do for this is let's say I want to do it on a particular industry at a time.
Alli Alosa: Like, I wanna say, okay.
Alli Alosa: I wanna find all the recent news for the companies in industry x, consumer goods or whatever.
Alli Alosa: First, what I could do is actually have a roll up of that news just to display it on this table.
Alli Alosa: And then I would do separated by two new line characters so that it's like, Duolingo, Stripe.
Alli Alosa: I only have 10, so I guess probably not in the same industry.
Alli Alosa: I don't have over that.
Alli Alosa: Oh, there it is.
Alli Alosa: So that's one piece of news.
Alli Alosa: I could, if I were being really fancy, separate this with, like, you know, lines, dashes in between so I could actually see which ones are the newest, what where the separators truly are.
Alli Alosa: Either way there, let's say I want to set up an automation, so to speak, where we don't even need an automation for this, but I am going to use one to make it fancier.
Alli Alosa: I wanna be able to click a button in an interface and have it run that agent for all of the linked records for software and IT.
Alli Alosa: I would do something like this.
Alli Alosa: Run, and then I'm gonna have this say run news agent.
Alli Alosa: Now if I set that to run, I'm gonna look up that field from the industry link, the field I just set up.
Alli Alosa: I'm gonna look it up over here.
Alli Alosa: And so when that becomes run, I can now set up a condition within my field agent to say, if this is run, do it.
Alli Alosa: Yeah.
Alli Alosa: So I'm gonna add that as an additional trigger in my field agent settings.
Alli Alosa: So this is where I would go under this when conditions are met section.
Alli Alosa: And I would say when run news agent has any of run.
Alli Alosa: Add.
Alli Alosa: Save.
Alli Alosa: Now the automation part is simply to clear that field out when I set it to run.
Alli Alosa: So I'm gonna set up an automation that just says, okay.
Alli Alosa: If run a run news agents, which if you're not watching my screen, is a single select field with one value in it that just says run.
Alli Alosa: And I'm gonna set up an automation that's triggered when that single select field is run.
Alli Alosa: I'm gonna update a record, that same record, on the industries table to just clear that value out.
Alli Alosa: Clear run agent field.
Alli Alosa: I don't know.
Alli Alosa: I'm just gonna poorly named automation, but we can come back to that later.
Alli Alosa: Now if I clear that here, if I I wish I could look at both at the same time, but I could do it in an in an inside of an interface, but still, I'll do it afterwards.
Alli Alosa: Let's say run, and I'll go back here.
Alli Alosa: And all five of those are already researching the web, and then that got cleared out.
Alli Alosa: So it isn't gonna, like, keep rerunning because that is set as run.
Alli Alosa: And so that's kind of, like, the first building block for me as ways to kinda set up pieces of an automated way of using agents.
Alli Alosa: You could get fancier from there.