AI Agents vs. AI Assistants

09/04/2025 25 min
AI Agents vs. AI Assistants

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Episode Synopsis

Dan Lee, (@_dan_lee_, CEO Nooks.ai, @JoinNooks) talks about agentic AI vs. AI assistants, their differences, and we explore ROI in this space vs. GenAI and common paths to adoption.SHOW: 913SHOW TRANSCRIPT: The Cloudcast #913 TranscriptSHOW VIDEO: https://youtube.com/@TheCloudcastNET CLOUD NEWS OF THE WEEK: http://bit.ly/cloudcast-cnotwNEW TO CLOUD? CHECK OUT OUR OTHER PODCAST:  "CLOUDCAST BASICS" SPONSORS:Try Postman AI Agent Builder TodayCut Enterprise IT Support Costs by 30-50% with US CloudSHOW NOTES:Nooks.ai websiteNooks Founders on Forbes 30 under 30 for AITopic 1 - Welcome to the show, Dan. Give everyone a quick introduction.Topic 2 - Our topic today is AI Agents vs. Assistants. Let’s start there. Many out there are hearing the terms and will often think an AI Agent is equal to an AI Assistant. What’s the difference?Topic 3 - One of the big problems I’ve seen with AI adoption vs. hype is the ROI. GenAI hit the scene and brought AI into the mainstream, but the world is quickly moving on to Agentic AI. I’ve mainly seen this play out because the ROI on “chatbots” just isn’t there most of the time and also everyone is still scared for data leaks/privacy and hallucinations.Topic 4 - We’ll get into Nooks.ai in a bit but before we do, I wanted to point out that your company started prior to the big breakout of GenAI. How did you see the market back then and has LLM’s and transformer models in general changed your approach to AI Assistants?Topic 5 - When taking customers through the adoption process for AI Assistants, what are the typical steps? How do you go about getting consensus and buy-in from the various orgs in the company? Are there common hurdles folks need to consider?Topic 6 - With Nooks, you’ve decided to conquer the domain of sales and sales prospecting. What was your thoughts here in deciding where and how to remove friction from sales? Is this decision and thought process transferable to other areas? Any universal considerations?FEEDBACK?Email: show at the cloudcast dot netBluesky: @cloudcastpod.bsky.socialTwitter/X: @cloudcastpodInstagram: @cloudcastpodTikTok: @cloudcastpod