AI Support Agents and AI Video: Two Tools Ready for Real Work

Customer service and video marketing are the two places where AI stopped being a demo and started doing paid work. Support agents are taking real shifts, and AI video has gone from gimmick to a tool you can use on Monday morning. Both matter for small businesses because both replace expensive work with cheap work.

Support agents are handling the first line of enquiries

Intercom's Fin, launched in 2023, showed what an AI support agent could do. Since then the category has filled out. Salesforce built AI agents into Agentforce, Zendesk added its own AI agents, and OpenAI, Anthropic and Google all ship products that can answer questions, check order details and pass the hard cases to a human.

The numbers behind the shift are real. Klarna reported in early 2024 that its AI assistant handled 2.3 million conversations in its first month, doing work the company said would have taken 700 full-time staff, and resolving two-thirds of chats on its own. Companies that run support at scale have been publishing similar results since. The lesson for a small business is not to hire fewer people. It is that routine questions do not have to eat the owner's afternoon.

An AI support agent costs a fraction of a staff hour, works after hours and never gets tired of the same question for the tenth time. Set one up with your prices, opening hours and common questions, and it can handle the first layer of every conversation.

AI video is past the novelty stage

OpenAI's Sora opened the public AI video era in December 2024. Google's Veo models and Runway's tools have pushed quality up since, and OpenAI followed with Sora 2, which added sound. The result is footage that is good enough for real marketing, not just social media experiments.

The useful part for a small business is not Hollywood-style clips. It is the boring jobs. A cafe can turn a photo of today's specials into a short video for Instagram. A real estate agent can produce a walkthrough of a property from a few photos. A tradie can show a finished job in a 20-second clip that looks better than most phone footage.

The cost is small enough to experiment. Generating a short clip costs cents per attempt, so the old reason not to try, that a video shoot costs hundreds of dollars, no longer applies. The bottleneck now is deciding what to make, not paying for it.

What to do this week

Pick one repetitive task in your business and see whether a support agent can take it. Then make one short AI video for your most popular product or service. Both can be done with free or cheap tools before you spend anything, and both give you a concrete result to judge.

This article was written by Triweb AI's editorial team based on analysis of today's leading AI news sources.