I’m using the time between Christmas and New Year to do some experimental work that I don’t normally get time to do. And that includes building AI Agents.

I’m building an agent to act as my virtual assistant (VA). It will perform tasks such as writing draft emails, scheduling calendar events, inviting people to Zoom meetings and sending WhatsApp message. All from sending simple messages in a dedicated Slack channel.

I’m using Make to build it. There are 2 main parts to it:

1. The AI Agent
2. The Make scenario

Agent

The agent has the main prompt, along with context, tools and MCP. I’ve asked it to use JSON for its response so that it can explicitly say that the action (such as, send email, schedule Zoom meeting) should be. This is then used in the Make scenario to perform the action itself.

Note: the above is not the full prompt, just the first part.

Scenario

The scenario takes the input from the Slack channel and passes it to the AI Agent. It then takes the JSON response, parses the JSON and then performs one of the actions. The actions could be one of:

• Create an email draft
• Schedule a Zoom meeting
• Create a calendar invite
• Send a WhatsApp message
• Ask another question to get more clarity on what I want.

As I develop this agent, not doubt I’ll add more actions.

Wrapping up

It’s definitely not as easy it as it looks, but great fun building it. This is a relatively simple AI agent, but even this will be super useful. And I’ll be able to build on it to extend its usefulness over time.