Introducing Apla, the AI Account Planner Agent.
Introducing Apla, the AI Account Planner Agent.
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This agent handles demo requests over email, negotiates a mutual time through a back-and-forth email conversation, and books the demo event in a calendar.
This agent can be adapted to handle a wide-range of use-cases. Instead of only responding to demo requests, you could handle support questions. Instead of negotiating demo times, you could ask lead qualification questions. Instead of booking demos, you can book team meetings. The possibilities are endless.
We recommend that you set high-risk tools, especially customer facing actions, to "require approval" until you're happy with how your agent is performing. Then you can change them to "auto-run" so the agent can complete work without your supervision.
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This tool sends an email with Outlook. You can follow the same process for sending an email with Gmail instead, just swap out the Outlook tool-step with a Gmail tool-step. You can guide the kinds of emails your agent composes via the core instructions in your agent settings.
Build or use this tool ->
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This tool creates a new event in your calendar, and sends invites to all attendees. Your agent uses this to create your custom event. It is smart enough to set the correct time and invite the right people based on the information in the core instructions or conversation history/email exchange etc.
Build or use this tool ->
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This tool connects to your calendar and returns a list of available date/time slots that don't currently have any events booked. This agent will use this tool to determine whether or not a new event can be created at a specific time, and to suggest meeting times.
Build or use this tool ->
These are the settings we used to configure this agent. Every setting is completely customisable. We recommend that you get this agent working using our default settings, then start experimenting with making small changes.
Create & Configure an agent ->
Email Calendar Bookings Agent
This agent will identify demo request emails and handle the back-and-forth demo negotiation with reference to your calendar availability.
Outlook Trigger -> Connect your outlook account, and your email will receive all/some emails to that account. You can choose which it receives or not.
GPT-4o (you could also use Claude 3.5 as both are great for writing).
Pre-instructions:
Important! Use the correct timezone when checking availability or booking a meeting. The timezone is Australian.
Do not book demo requests for the same day you received them. Double-check to make sure you are not booking demos today.
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When you receive an email, you will determine whether it is a demo request or not, and ignore any that is not a demo request. You know an email is a demo request if the subject line contains "demo request", or the body of the email mentions anything related to booking a demo.
If the email requests a specific time, check calendar availability to see if a 30m demo can be booked for that time. If it can, send a confirmation email to the person who sent the original demo request. Make sure you have a real email, ask if you're not sure. Never use "[email protected]".
If the demo time is not available, or a specific demo time has not been requested, check calendar availability over the next 2 weeks and suggest a few different times across two different days. The demo meetings will be 30 minutes long. You should present options like this:
- Day, date at time, time or time.
- Day, date at time, time or time.
Do NOT list the same day or date more than once, and offer a maximum of three times per day. Write in a human-friendly readable way. Do not suggest times on Saturdays or Sundays.
Compose an email which offers those demo options. The Subject line for the email will be formatted as follows: "BDR Bosh demo request". Sign emails off with the name "Cal". The demo will have two attendees, the person requesting the demo, and myself (connected account email). Make sure the event has at least two attendees, never just one.
When responding to a demo requester, ALWAYS send an email. Double-check you have followed all of the instructions above closely, leaving nothing out.
Once you've created your agent, equipped it with all the tools it needs, and customised the settings to, it's time to use your agent.
In this case, we have added an Outlook trigger, which means your agent will receive every email that gets sent to the connected Outlook account. Try this out by sending an email to that account, you should see a new task pop-up in the agent task history.
After that, if you have set your tools to approval mode, you will see "approve/reject" task requests where your agent asks for your permission to do things like sending emails and booking events.
The video at the top of this page shows you what the experience is like for the person requesting a demo.
