I tested five AI agent platforms: here’s what I learned

After testing five different platforms that promise a suite of easy AI agents. Here are my takeaways:

1) Companies selling AI agents (low OR no code) need need need to invest in user research and design. The interfaces are uninspiring. The workflows are not intuitive. A lot of it feels like I am back in 1998 looking at my college email provider, and I am doing SO much more of the work than I am used to on a website.

2) A lot of the onboarding is lazy. Since there was no time taken on creating a user experience, there is a ton of email, videos, and other tools that are outside the product itself. I am not learning in the tool - I am leaving the tool to learn. Will I come back? Maybe?

3) There is far too much reliance on logic flows when building the agents. I get it, that's how agents work... but I don't want to create a flow chart to get my agent to do something when I am so used to Claude or ChatGPT doing things for me. Everyday AI has set the bar for it to be easy. Even the easiest of the tools I tested was not easy.

4) Speaking of which... I need to do too much work to modify templated agents. The purpose of a template is that it will be less work. I felt like it was about the same work to modify a template as it was to create something from scratch... and the ones I created from scratch I at least understood what they were going to do for me.

5) Troubleshooting is nonexistent. The agent didn't work? Ope. Up to me to figure out why. Also, there were no warnings against doing things incorrectly. With one tool I successfully built an agent, then built it again but did it wrong on purpose. The product just let me. There were no safeguards for me as a user to be successful.

If these companies have any interest in selling to the average human, or even the more tech-savvy non-engineer, there is A LOT of work to be done. People expect AI to be easy. That's the promise written into all of the marketing. If it's not, they will do what I did and end the free trial early. They won't be back.

Don’t worry about sounding professional. Sound like you. There are over 1.5 billion websites out there, but your story is what’s going to separate this one from the rest. If you read the words back and don’t hear your own voice in your head, that’s a good sign you still have more work to do.

Be clear, be confident and don’t overthink it. The beauty of your story is that it’s going to continue to evolve and your site can evolve with it. Your goal should be to make it feel right for right now. Later will take care of itself. It always does.