10 AI Agent Platforms Every Business Leader Needs To Know

Artificial intelligence has moved fast from curiosity to capability, and nowhere is that more visible than in the rise of AI agents. These systems can plan, decide, and act on our behalf, automating real work rather than simply responding to prompts.

The challenge for most organizations is no longer whether AI agents matter, but where to begin. Over the past year, an explosion of platforms has promised to help businesses build, deploy, and manage agentic systems, ranging from beginner-friendly tools to powerful enterprise frameworks.

Let’s break down some of the most practical and influential platforms available today and show how they can help organizations take their first meaningful steps toward an AI-powered workforce.

Google Vertex And Astra

A great place to start is with the big cloud providers like Google. Its agentic ecosystem is built around the Vertex AI platform, which aims to provide a beginner-friendly environment for designing, building and deploying agents. A strength is its ability to search and process online data in real time, due to its integration with the Google web ecosystem. Astra is a prototype for a universal AI assistant that’s likely to become more ingrained in Google’s agentic toolset in the near future.

Microsoft Copilot Studio

Platforms offered by the cloud giants tend to focus on leveraging their existing strengths, and with Microsoft’s offering, that means deep integration with its Teams and 365 enterprise productivity ecosystems. If you’re looking to build agents for relatively generic use cases involving automating workflows that you already carry out on these widely used platforms, it might be the obvious choice.

Amazon Bedrock AgentCore

Amazon AWS is the world’s most popular cloud provider, and now it lets users unleash agents across its whole suite of features and services. As you’d expect, this means a strong focus on security, always a critical element of any cloud deployment. If your organization is heavily invested in the AWS ecosystem, then it’s a natural starting point for beginner-level agent deployments, thanks to the ease of configuring and managing access to AWS resources.

OpenAI AgentKit

OpenAI, creator of ChatGPT, lets users configure, build, and manage AI agents through its custom GPTs and AgentKit platform. AgentKit provides a comprehensive framework for defining agentic workflows and managing access to third-party datasets and tools. All of this is done through a super user-friendly visual “drag and drop” interface. Another useful feature is Guardrails, a modular safety layer that safeguards against dangerous or unintended behavior.

Salesforce Agentforce

Salesforce is commonly used to manage business customer relationships, and its Agentforce platform is built to automate many of the processes that this involves. This could include sales, marketing and customer service workflows. However, it goes further, capable of creating and managing agents for any tasks that involve calling APIs, connecting and controlling third-party systems and processing end-to-end workflows using external data.

UIPath Studio

UIPath started out as a platform for automating tasks programmatically but has now evolved into an ecosystem for developing and deploying agentic tools. This might be very useful for certain use cases that require the precision of more traditional robotic methods of process automation, combined with the ability to make decisions on the fly provided by AI. A feature that sets it apart is its ability to “see” content on-screen, making it a good option for automating legacy software that might not allow API access to agents directly.

HubSpot Breeze Agent

HubSpot’s Breeze agents are specialized tools for automating CRM tasks like marketing, sales and customer service. As they plug directly into the HubSpot platform, their workflows will already be familiar to many small and medium-sized businesses. They can create and automate campaigns, follow up leads, triage and troubleshoot customer service issues and handle many routine customer interactions. Potentially a great option for smaller organizations looking for “quick wins”.

Zapier Agents

Zapier started as a tool to connect different business and productivity apps through simple automated workflows. Adding agents to the mix means users can now coordinate the activity of thousands of SaaS tools and platforms that Zapier knows how to speak to. Simply describe the workflow you want to build using the Canvas Visual Studio and start chaining your existing apps together to create agentic processes.

QuickBooks AI Agents

Popular accounting package QuickBooks has now integrated its own agents for common routine and time-consuming tasks such as chasing invoice payments, reconciling accounts and preparing cash-flow forecasts. As QuickBooks customers will typically already have all of their financial data in the platform, this can often be a quick and easy win for smaller to medium-sized businesses looking to implement their first AI agent workflows.

Replit Agent 3

Replit is a “vibe coding” platform designed to simplify the process of creating anything from web pages to fully featured apps. Its agentic approach allows it to automate code generation, testing, debugging, refactoring and deployment, combining the functionality of a coding integrated development environment with an AI assistant. While it’s more technical than some of the more specialized tools covered here, the variety of projects it can be used for is virtually unlimited.

What This Means For Business Leaders

AI agents are quickly becoming a practical way to automate work, scale expertise, and unlock new levels of productivity across the organization. The platforms highlighted here show that getting started no longer requires deep technical skills, but it does require clarity on where agents can create the most value, along with a willingness to experiment, learn and iterate as this technology continues to mature.