305 | Mastering AI Automation: Custom GPTs to Agents with Isar Meitis

**Isar Meitis** (0:03)
Hello, and welcome to the Leveraging AI Podcast, the podcast that shares practical, ethical ways to leverage AI to improve efficiency, grow your business, and advance your career. This is Isar Meitis, your host, and I have a interesting episode for you today. There have been growing rumors in the past few months that OpenAI will cancel custom GPTs. Now, those of you who don't know what custom GPTs are, well, then you're not missing much. But if you did not use any custom GPTs so far, then you were missing maybe the most capable automation tool that AI gave us until the existence of skills and agents. And many, many, many people, myself included, has multiple custom GPTs, which they were regularly using to run multiple things in their business. I switched completely to skills and agents, but I know many people who have not. Now, I haven't seen any real information from OpenAI about custom GPTs going away, but if you're following what's happening on X or on Reddit, then you would see that there are many conversations talking about custom GPTs going away.
And if you are somebody like me, who until not too long ago were running a lot of aspects of my business through custom GPTs, then it is something that you need to be aware of and start preparing for. Either way, whether you have built custom GPTs that you're using regularly or you don't, and you want to know how to build different kinds of automations, with AI that can run more or less everything in your business, this would be a great episode for you to learn the basic concepts because they're the same across the board. So let's get started. I'm going to be sharing my screen, but those of you who are just listening and not watching this, I will explain everything that is on the screen. So if you are driving or walking your dog or doing the dishes or something like that, yoga, and you can't watch the screen, then that's perfectly fine. But if you do want to watch the screen and you are able to do this now, you can either do this on Spotify or sharing the videos on Spotify, as well as on our YouTube channel, and there's a link to the YouTube channel on the show notes. But let's get started. So there are several different levels on the ways you can work with AI, whether it's ChatGPT or any of the others. The very basic one is chat, right? You can just go to the chat window of Gemini or Cloud or ChatGPT, et cetera, and just chat with it, and then you give it instructions or questions, and then it does what it needs to do. You are heavily involved in the process. Option number 2 is to create custom GPTs or projects. These are a consistent setup with a bunch of instructions and additional supporting information that becomes reusable and allows the AI to follow an existing set of instructions time and time again without you having to give it any additional instructions. We're going to see examples shortly. The third level, which is the newest of the three, and if you want from an evolution perspective, we had custom GPTs first. That was something that OpenAI invented. Then we got projects from Anthropic, which were then copied by OpenAI to have projects inside of OpenAI. And then we received GEMS from Gemini, which is a very similar concept. And then we got scales and agents and so on. So scales was long after we had projects, but scales allows you to make it portable and reusable automation components, building blocks, that you can use in multiple places. You can use scales in other platforms. So if you are using, as an example, ChatGPT in Excel, there is an extension for that, or ChatGPT in PowerPoint, there's an extension for that, you can take your scales with you. So if you have created scales for specific processes in financial analysis, you can bring them from ChatGPT into ChatGPT in Excel. And if you have a specific branding or process or style that you're using and you created scales for that, you can bring it into PowerPoint as well. And then on top of that, there are obviously agents where you can build agents. And to be fair, I'll do a little distinction on what agents are and what they're not, because there's a lot of chatter and everybody calls everything agents right now when it's not really the case. So agents are employees, right? It's an entity that can do a full, complete workflow and not just one simple specific task again and again. And they can do it end to end and they can do it in a consistent way while taking into account information they have and they do not have. I'm not going to cover this today. We're going to stop at skills because I want to show you the basic building blocks that you can use.