{
  "video_id": "LNkAW4SSgdY",
  "channel_slug": "techwithtim",
  "channel_handle": "Tech With Tim",
  "title": "The Complete Guide to AI Agents in 2026 (And How to Actually Use Them)",
  "duration_seconds": 1238,
  "url": "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LNkAW4SSgdY",
  "upload_date": "20260521",
  "transcript": "Everyone's talking about AI agents right\nnow, but honestly,\nmost people are still using AI\nthe same way that they were two years ago.\nThey open ChatGPT.\nType of question,\nget an answer, copy paste it somewhere.\nThat's level one.\nIf you're someone\nwho's not satisfied with basic AI usage,\nand if you feel like you should be\ngetting way more out of these tools,\nif you're essentially running things\nas a one person team\nand you need to multiply your output,\nthen pay close attention.\nThis video is going to change\nhow you work because I'm going to show you\nhow to properly use AI agents.\nWhat I'll do is walk\nyou through every level of AI usage,\nfrom basic chat\nall the way up to fully autonomous\nAI agents that do work\nwhile you're not even at your computer\nwhile you're sleeping.\nAnd I'm going to show\nyou real examples of each of these levels\nso you can actually understand\nhow to use them and how to implement them.\nNow this video is sponsored\nby Gen Spark, an all in one AI workspace,\nthe one from 0 to $250 million\nin annual run rate in just 12 months.\nAnd the reason that I picked them for this\nvideo is because they're one\nof the only platforms where you can see\nevery level of AI usage in one place.\nNow, that said, what I'm going to show you\nhere is agnostic, meaning\nyou can use it anywhere you want\nor on multiple other platforms.\nBut Gen Spark just\nhas it all in one place.\nHence why I'm going to show it to you\nanyways, let's get into it.\nSo before I show you anything,\nlet me explain the framework.\nThere's basically four levels\nto how you can use AI right now in 2026.\nAnd most people are stuck on level\none without even realizing\nthat these other three levels exist.\nNow level one is AI chat.\nYou ask a question, you get an answer.\nAnd this is something like ChatGPT. Right.\nThis is Claude.\nThis is where 90% of people think AI is.\nNow it's useful,\nbut you're doing all the work.\nYou're deciding what to ask.\nYou're the one copying\nand pasting the output.\nYou're figuring out what to do with it.\nNow, as an example, you're\nprepping for a meeting and you ask the AI.\nSummarize\nthe key trends in SaaS pricing for 2026.\nNow you get a solid answer,\nbut you still have to take that\nand do something with it yourself.\nNow, level two is AI tools.\nNow this is where I starts\ndoing specific jobs.\nSo building slides, writing documents,\nanalyzing spreadsheets, generating images.\nRight. Now\nit's not just answering questions anymore.\nIt's actually producing finished work.\nBut you're still driving it, right?\nAnd you're initiating every task.\nNow, as an example,\nyou need a pitch deck or a slide\ndeck for a client call tomorrow.\nNow, instead of spending three hours\nin PowerPoint, you describe what you need,\nand the AI produces a finished\npresentation that you can actually send.\nNow level three is AI workflows.\nNow this is where AI starts\nconnecting tasks together automatically.\nSo instead of you saying do this now.\nNow do this now. Do this now. Do this.\nYou set up a pipeline once and your\nAI handles the whole chain automatically.\nSo for example, research this,\nput it in a spreadsheet,\nemail me the results,\nyou set it and it runs.\nSo maybe every morning you need to\ncatch up on overnight messages,\nfigure out your priorities\nfor the next day,\nor prep for your first meeting, right?\nThe goal is to walk into your workday\nfully briefed without spending 45 minutes\ndoing it manually.\nNow, you could build a workflow\nthat does all of this for you\nand gives you that morning routine.\nAnd we're actually going to look at that\nlater.\nOkay.\nNow level four AI agents.\nNow this is the current frontier.\nAnd this is where you give the AI a goal.\nSo you don't give it a task.\nYou just give it a general goal\nand it figures out the steps on its own.\nNow it can browse the web,\nwrite code, send messages, manage files.\nIt reasons about what to do next.\nNow this is where things get pretty cool.\nAnd an example of this\nis that you might want to launch\na landing page for a new product.\nNow the goal was a live deployed website\nwith real copy, real visuals,\nyou know, working sign up form, whatever.\nNow you don't tell the agent\nhow to do this.\nYou just describe\nwhat the finished product looks like\nand it researches, finds\nthe competitors, the design, writes\nthe code, sources the images, and deploys\nthe entire site for you.\nYou started with the goal\nand you got the result.\nNow here's the thing.\nYou're probably going\nto need all four levels\nof this depending on what you're doing.\nNow the mistake is thinking\nthat one level is better than another.\nSometimes\nyou just need to ask a quick question.\nSometimes you need an agent\nrunning for hours.\nDepends on your use case.\nBut I want to show you\nall of the four levels here.\nSo you understand how to use them\nand how to put them into practice.\nAll right. So what I'm going to do here\nis dive into Gen Spark.\nI've got to open up my computer.\nAnd again like I mentioned\nyou have all four levels available here.\nYou have workflows.\nYou have chat, you have slides whatever.\nYou're going to see how it works.\nLet's start with level one.\nOkay. So level one is AI chat.\nNow you already know what this is.\nBut Gen Spark here\ndoes something that's a little bit\ndifferent and worth pointing out.\nNow most AI tools like ChatGPT cloud,\nwhatever, they lock you into one model.\nSo if you're using ChatGPT,\nyou're using GPT, you're using,\nanthropic script using cloud.\nRight now with Gen Spark,\nyou actually get unlimited access\nto all of the top models.\nSo GPT Claude Gemini doesn't matter.\nAnd it will pick the best model\nfor your specific task automatically.\nNow, it's worth noting\nbecause if you use a tool like Claude,\nfor example,\nyou'll very quickly run out of the usage\neven if you're on like a $200\nper month plan.\nBut with Gen Spark for any of their paid\nusers, they actually offer\nunlimited access to all of the top\nAI models,\nassuming that you're not abusing it\nso you can even do like image generation,\nfor example,\ncompletely unlimited inside of this tool.\nAnd you'll see you can switch\nbetween light standard and ultra.\nAnd if you go to ultra,\nyou're using opus 4.7.\nThe top model, but with no limits here\nand at a significantly cheaper price.\nYou just use. You don't need to worry\nabout rationing the credits.\nSo what I'll do just as an example for\nlevel one or something like this, right?\nGive me a detailed breakdown of the\ncurrent state of AI coding tools in 2026.\nWhat's available?\nPricing pros and cons of each.\nLet's hit enter. Let's see what we get.\nAll right,\nso let's pick 1 or 2 minutes here\nbecause I put it in the ultra mode\nwhere it just uses\na little bit more reasoning.\nWe can see it did some searches here.\nSo it searched\nthrough a bunch of different websites,\ngot all of the results,\nand then let me just close this here\nand pulled it back\nand gave us kind of this long chat. Right.\nSo heavyweight IDs, full comparison,\nyou know, kind of a table whatever.\nYou get the idea. And this works well.\nBut again, we're kind of stuck in the chat\ninterface here.\nIf I want something from here\nI'm copying and pasting it.\nAnd I don't really have anything usable.\nI just have information that's level one.\nNow let's move to level two.\nSo like I mentioned, level two is\nwhen we're using AI tools\nthat actually produce finished work.\nNow if we go to the new button here\ninstead of Gen Z.\nYou see there's a bunch of options\nlike I slide\nsheets, docs, developer video chat,\nwhatever I image.\nAnd all of these are agents\nthat are set up by Gen Spark\nwith access to specific tools\nthat allow them to actually create\nfinished products or finished work.\nSo let's go over to AI slides here.\nAll right.\nSo from here\nwe have a lot of different options\nfor how\nwe actually create the presentation.\nWe can change the ratio.\nIn my case I'll just keep it 16 by nine.\nWe can also go into creative mode.\nIf we do that\nit's going to give us the visuals\nthat are generated using, image\ngeneration models like nano banana or GPT\nimage two,\nrather than just like key information.\nSo you'll get kind of like infographic\ntype stuff, as you could see right here,\nwhich is kind of cool.\nSo let's try that out and then we can turn\non guide mode as well.\nAnd what this is going to do\nis step through\nand ask us a bunch of questions\nabout the presentation\nbefore it creates it to make sure\nthat we have everything defined.\nSo what I'm going to do\nis I'm actually going to just paste\nin all the information that we had from,\nwhat do you call it, the,\nprevious section where we're using\nthe chat mode and I'm going to say create\na five page PowerPoint presentation\nwith the key details from the text above.\nOkay.\nAnd of course, we could be more specific,\nbut for now let's go with that.\nLet's hit enter and let's see what we get.\nOkay.\nSo you can see because we're in guide mode\nhere,\nwhat it's actually doing is creating kind\nof a plan of what it needs to do here\nbefore it goes and creates the PowerPoint.\nTypically, whatever tool you're using,\nyou should kind of have a general plan\nof what you want to be on the slides,\nwhat images you're going to generate, etc.\nso even if you're not using Gen Spark,\njust make sure you have some kind of plan\nbefore you use these types of tools,\nbecause typically the\nAI is going to be better\nwhen it goes through it\nin phases and steps, rather than trying\nto generate the entire thing at once.\nNow, a lot of the top models\nwill try to do that automatically,\nbut you can see here it's\nkind of built into this particular tool\nwhere it's going through here,\nyou know, phase one, phase two, etc.\nand mapping\nwhat's actually going to be on each slide.\nPerfect. And then you can see it's\nask this the first question here.\nWhat's the primary audience\nfor this presentation.\nLet's just go with YouTube\naudience like that.\nThe core purpose let's go.\nMaybe information transfer.\nAnd then how is this going to be\ndelivered.\nLet's go live presentation like that.\nSo just wrapped up the PowerPoint.\nNow I think this took about 3\nor 4 minutes.\nAnd I'm pretty impressed by the quality\nof GPT image two here with the image Gen.\nI guess the prompting was good here\nfrom Gen Spark as well.\nBut if you have a look at these,\nthese are all images.\nSo this isn't like generated with,\nyou know, HTML or something.\nThis was image\ntwo generating this or GPT image two.\nAnd you can see that\nwe have the five slides I asked for.\nLooks really good.\nAnd then if I want\nI can edit something right.\nI edit go and enrich the content, simplify\nwhatever or I can export it.\nSo if I go to the presentation view,\nfor example,\nit's going to bring it to me right here.\nI could play the slides\nor I could just export it as like a PDF,\nPowerPoint, Google Slides, whatever,\nand then use it however I want.\nSo overall that's level two.\nIt's actually having the AI agent produce\nreal work for you that you can use.\nIn this case it's a PowerPoint slide.\nBut like I mentioned before,\nthere are a ton of other tools\nyou could use chat, podcasts,\nvideo, research.\nYou know,\nI sheets, documents, images, whatever.\nYou guys get the idea.\nBut let's move over to level three.\nSo in level three\nwe talk about automation.\nNow this is where most people's minds\nreally should light up here,\nbecause this is where AI start\nto actually become useful\nand save you hours of time\nby doing something automatically.\nNow the idea is pretty simple.\nInstead of you doing the same sequence\nof tasks every single day,\nyou build a workflow one time\nand then AI handles that whole chain.\nNow the difference between this and basic\nautomation, things like, you know, Zapier\nmake whatever is that there's actually\nAI reasoning that's inside of the loop.\nSo it's not just if this happens\nand do that, if this happens, do that.\nIt's more along\nthe lines of read this, understand it,\nmake a decision,\nand then take an action based on that.\nIt's a lot more customized and works\nlonger term,\nbecause you don't need to handle\nevery single edge case up front.\nNow, Gen Spark actually just launched\ntheir own workflow tool here.\nSo if you press into the workflows button,\nI'm going to show you how to do this.\nAnd we're actually going\nto create our own workflow from scratch.\nNow again you can build workflows\nand all kinds of other tools.\nBut I just want to show you\nan example of what I mean here.\nSo you can see why\nthis is actually incredibly useful\nand start thinking about your work\nand your company or whatever\nyou're building in terms of workflows,\nright, in terms of SOPs.\nAnd then you can build those into various\nAI platforms like Gen Spark and have it\nautomate for you, which I have a ton for,\nfor all of my businesses right now.\nSo anyways, from workflows\nhere, I'm going to go to New Workflow.\nYou also can just go based off of\none of the templates that they have here.\nAnd for the workflow we can actually just\nask directly in the chat.\nAnd what it will do\nis start creating all of the different\nkind of actions or steps.\nYou'll see that there's workflow here.\nWe have starter so we can choose\ndo we want to do this on a schedule\nwhen we get an email.\nAnd then we can go choose a step.\nAnd there's a bunch of different\nintegrations that we can use. Now.\nIn order for these integrations to work,\nyou'll need to connect your accounts.\nSo if you press this button in the bottom,\nyou can add various connectors.\nYou can see\nthere are a ton of different options here.\nAnd in my case I'm using like Gmail,\ncalendar, drive, contacts, notion.\nAnd then I have slack connected as well.\nSo what I'm going to do here\nis I'm actually going to set up a workflow\nthat's going to act\nkind of like a morning brief.\nSo I already have a prompt\nthat I want to roll with here.\nSo I'm just going to paste it in\nand I'll read it to you.\nSo step one is I want to check\nall of my overnight messages.\nMy email, slack any notifications,\nand then summarize anything that needs\nmy attention. Step two\nI want to pull my calendar for today\nand identify what I need to prep for.\nAnd then step three.\nBased on what came in overnight\nand what's on my calendar, generate\na prioritized To-Do list for the day.\nStep four I want to take the top 1 or 2\nsimple tasks from that list, like drafting\na reply, summarizing a document, whatever,\nand then actually complete them.\nAnd then step five send me a full briefing\nwith completed tasks by 7 a.m.\nevery morning.\nOkay,\nso I'm going to go ahead and press on.\nEnter here again.\nThis is working because I've already added\nthese various connectors.\nIt's really easy.\nIf you just press into it,\nyou'll just sign in with Google\nand it will automatically connect it\nfor you.\nAnd then what it should do\nhere is start actually\ncreating the nodes in the workflow for me.\nOnce it's done, I'll be right back.\nLet's make sure it's spun up\nand we'll be good to go.\nAll right.\nSo just completed the workflow here.\nAnd as a test it actually sent me\nthe good morning brief.\nIt was connected to my dev launch email\nand said hey you have group mentorship\nsession today at 8 to 9 a.m.\nPacific time.\nCheck the emails.\nThis is cleans your actions.\nHere's\nsomething we need to do about kajabi okay.\nGroup mentorship.\nThis is happening.\nHere's the information and the to do list.\nAnd then here's what we're going to do\nokay.\nMini session member spotlight whatever.\nIt's giving me an idea\non how I can run that session.\nAnd I actually like how nice\nthe email is formatted.\nI mean, that looks pretty good.\nAnd if we go back here,\nyou can see that it's now created\nkind of the workflow steps\nwhich we can adjust.\nObviously if it didn't match what we want,\nwe check overnight Gmail check\novernight outlook check overnight slack\nmessages, pull today's Google calendar.\nAlso check the outlook calendar.\nGenerate, prioritize to do.\nComplete the simple tasks and then compose\nthe HTML briefing and send it via email.\nAnd if we click into any step, we can see\nit's automatically being created here.\nAnd it says what we need to do\nusing the Gmail search.\nNow, if we want to add the steps ourself\nand be a bit more specific,\nwe can actually pick a specific thing here\nlike, you know, send message in slack,\nsearch messages, look something up.\nBut the eye is able to kind of\nhave its own eye step.\nAs you can see,\nthat will automatically call these.\nBut if we want it to be\nlike super precise,\nthen we can say you don't create\nnew issue, right?\nAnd then we'll use that specific tool\nin this prompt and it will know to go\nand use that tool right.\nTo create an issue on GitHub\nI'm going to delete that one\nbecause I don't want that.\nBut you kind of get the idea\nin terms of these additional steps\nthat you can add to the workflow.\nSo this is just one simple workflow,\nright?\nI'm going to keep this running\nbecause it will give me a morning brief.\nAnd it took me\nmaybe five minutes to create this.\nAnd you'll see that\nif we go to the workflow, it's actually\ngiven kind of a full step by step list\nas well as well as the overall step steps.\nSorry that we have here,\nbut now imagine if you had 5 or 10 or 15\nor 20 of these workflows running\nfor different businesses or processes\nor habits or whatever you want to do.\nI mean, you can really automate things\nquite well, and this works super\nwell when you know, step by step\nexactly what you want to do,\nand you just want that to run\non a specific trigger or schedule, right?\nLike when you receive an email\nor at a certain point in the day,\nwhich is super cool.\nOkay, so that's level three,\nbut now let's move to level four.\nSo now we move to level four,\nwhich is running some type of autonomous\nAI agent\nthat's always running in the background.\nAnd for this we're talking about something\nlike open claw right.\nOr Hermes agent.\nNow you can deploy these on your own.\nYou can run them on your own computer.\nBut right inside of Gen Spark,\nthey actually have\ntheir own version called Gen Spark Claw.\nIt runs in a virtual private\nserver securely in the cloud\nwithout you needing to configure anything.\nAnd this was literally me\npressing one button.\nIt spun it up, and now I have\nwhat they're calling my first AI employee.\nNow, the reason why you might want to use\nsomething like this is that it can run\nwhen you are not actively managing it\nor looking at it on the computer.\nSo we had the workflows, right.\nAnd those might trigger on\nsome kind of action or some kind of task.\nBut with this I can just give it a high\nlevel goal and it can run all night.\nIt can create its own workflows,\nit can create its own skills.\nAnd if you look here just in the settings,\nwe have different channels\nwe can connect.\nSo I can message it from WhatsApp\nor Line or Slack.\nI can connect to different services.\nRight.\nYou can see that\nwe're already connected to some here,\nbut we can connect a lot more.\nWe can have various scheduled tasks\nthat are automatically created here.\nRight.\nYou can see there's some templates\nfor how to do that\nlike Morning Briefing, Daily Review, etc.\nyou can directly access the terminal\nso you can start messing with it.\nActually connect to the agent itself.\nYou have file settings,\nall of this kind of stuff.\nI'm not going to go through everything,\nbut the point is\nthat this is a lot more autonomous,\nmeaning you don't need to give it step\nby step instructions.\nYou just tell it, hey,\nI want this thing done\nand it figures out how to do that,\nand it will run\nautomatically in the background.\nSo what I'm going to do\nis just give this a high level\ntask right now and I'm going to say, hey,\nI want to create like a new landing page\nor something, and we'll just have it, code\nit, deploy it, all of that.\nLet me put in a prompt\nand I'll show you what I mean. Okay.\nSo I just told this\nI need to launch a simple landing page\nfor a new product called limelight.\nFor a flashlight attached your boat\nthat is used for fishing research\nwith the best landing pages in this space\nlook like.\nThen build one for me.\nInclude an email sign up form,\ncompelling copy, modern design,\nand use image generation\nto show what the product might look like.\nDeploy it when you're done\nand then I can choose the exact model\nthat I want to run here.\nSo in my case, I'll just go with opus 4.6\nat 1 million contacts.\nBut again, you can pretty much pick\nwhatever you want.\nAnd in the case of the Gen Spark Claw\nhere,\nyou get a certain number of credits\nfor the claw specifically,\nbut all of the other stuff you use with\nAI is unlimited.\nAs I mentioned,\nas long as you have some paid account.\nSo let's go ahead and press on, enter\nand let's see what kind of happens here\nand what result we get okay.\nSo just finish\nI just want to run through the logs\nso you can kind of quickly\nsee what happens.\nYou see it\nactually started looking at skills\nthat are pre-installed in here\nfor doing like research for example.\nYou can see it found information, get lit,\nget bit like fishing related stuff.\nLet's wait for image\ngeneration to complete.\nOkay, all the images are finished\nand it went through and it did\nall of the steps that us needing to ask\nit step by step.\nIt then created this site and deployed it\nto this URL which we can view.\nRight. So let's go through it.\nWe can see 3000 lumens, Ip68,\n20 hours,\n50ft depth, every feature on the radar.\nOkay, this is what it looks like.\nAnd these were again generated story with\nI think it was GPT image two.\nNot sure exactly\nwhat model has the fake reviews.\nAnd then it even has the ability\nto put in our email to get early access.\nAnd you see that redirects down there.\nIf we go product\nbrings us to the product page\nand we can view some more information.\nAnd that took maybe like 5 or 10 minutes.\nAnd of course\nthat was a relatively simple task.\nBut if I ask it something much\nmore complicated, I can just let this run.\nI can do it from my phone.\nI can connect it to different channels,\nand it can just run automatically\nin the background\nand even self improve itself.\nYou don't as much as I want it to.\nNow this is the difference\nI was alluding to\nat the beginning of the video right now\nat level one, I ask a question.\nWe get text back at level four.\nI describe what I want done\nand I just handles the entire execution.\nIn this case, researching, building,\ndeploying, organizing, generating images\ncompletely autonomously.\nNow this clearly goes\nseveral steps beyond using other\nAI coding tools to just build a website.\nRight now you might be thinking open\ncloud can do this too.\nAnd it can.\nBut as you've seen on my channel,\ninstalling Open Claw can take a long time.\nYou need to buy a new computer,\nor you need to buy VPNs,\nand you probably don't know\nhow to set it up properly\nunless you want to follow\nthrough all of those steps,\nwhich can be a little bit complicated,\nespecially if you're not technical.\nWhereas Gen Spark here provides\nthe virtual machine literally two clicks,\nyou have it set up,\nand then in five minutes after that,\nyou can connect it to whatever\nchannel you want and start using it.\nSo with all of this shown,\nlet me give you a framework\nfor how to actually use these steps.\nNow if you have a quick question,\nuse level one right open super agent.\nAsk it a question. Get your answer.\nDon't over complicate it.\nThis is for everyone.\nI do it all the time.\nIf you need a specific deliverable,\nthat's level two like\nslides, documents, images, websites,\nspreadsheets, whatever.\nUse the dedicated AI tools\nbecause they produce better output\nthan trying to get a chatbot\nto format things for you.\nNow this is for busy professionals,\none person teams, whatever.\nYou get the idea.\nNow, if you have a repetitive process,\nthat's level three.\nSo build a workflow,\nset it up once, let it run,\nand if you're doing the same sequence\nof tasks more than twice,\nyou should think about creating a workflow\nfor it.\nNow, this honestly is\nwhere a lot of people are getting benefits\nof AI is having these AI based workflows\nto automate a ton of their tasks.\nNow lastly, if you have a complex goal\nwith unclear steps, that's level four.\nRight hand it to claw.\nDescribe what done looks like\nand let the agent figure out the path.\nNow this is for those of you\nthat have heard of claw before,\nbut maybe you haven't tried it out.\nYou can do it\nreally easily inside of Gen Spark.\nNow, the reason why I think this and Gen\nSpark is worth paying attention to,\nand why they hit 250 million in are\nis that they are one of the only platforms\nthat has all four of these levels\nin a dedicated workspace.\nSo you're not just juggling\nsix different subscriptions,\nyou're not copying and pasting\nbetween tools.\nEverything's connected together now,\njust so you're aware,\nif you do sign up for this\nand you are a new user,\nyou will get some free credits.\nYou don't need to pay to try this out,\nand if you do upgrade to a paid plan,\nthen you will get unlimited\nuse of AI, chat and AI image generation\nall throughout 2026, which is subject,\nof course, to the abuse guardrails\nthat Gen Spark has set.\nAnyways, I'm going to leave a link to it\nin the description.\nLet me know what you guys thought of this\nvideo\nand how you're using AI agents in 2026.\nI think it's genuinely very helpful\nto see the four different levels\nhere, and understand\nhow you could be using them better.\nAnyways, if you enjoyed this video,\nleave a like subscribe\nand I will see you in the next one.",
  "transcript_chars": 25181,
  "ingested_at": "2026-05-21T19:04:33.824985+00:00",
  "source": "retry-no-transcript",
  "yt_meta": {
    "view_count": 2704,
    "like_count": 189,
    "channel_id": "UC4JX40jDee_tINbkjycV4Sg"
  }
}