News

There's an Agent for That

• By Howard M. Cohen
• 06/20/2025

We’ve been talking about agents here in Practical AI since December 6, 2024 when we said, “Welcome to the Agentic World.” So, we’ve been talking about agents all year. Let’s remember that the year is only six months old as of this writing.

Just like the advent of cloud computing and the current rise of generative artificial intelligence, agentic has stirred up fear and apprehension among many business users and executives. Providers like Microsoft tell us how easy it is to build your own agents using natural language processing (NLP), where you just write out what you want to do in Copilot Studio and, bam, there you have it. I suspect that very few people believe that.

So... Let's step into the Wayback Machine and travel to 1982, when the IBM PC was turning one year old, and the Apple II just a little older than that. "VisiCalc," arguably the first "killer app,"  had suddenly created that "hockey stick" moment for sales of these devices, now that people could see something practical they could do with them.

VisiCalc also launched a software explosion! Advertisements for packaged software were everywhere. The back of the fabled Byte Magazine ran ads for pages and pages. Sears Business Centers, Nynex Stores, and the new ComputerLand franchises featured racks and racks of new software products ready to be purchased and loaded into your chosen personal computer.
 
So now we're back in 2025 with most users trepidatiously considering AI agents, confused about how to create them and, I, the industry has stepped up once again, this time with an agent explosion!

Of course, the distribution model has changed as it has for literally every kind of product imaginable. You won’t be visiting your local computer store or anyplace else to find prepackaged, ready-to-go AI agents. You’ll find them online.

Where online? Welcome to the Agentic Marketplace.

Actually, I should say, welcome to the Agentic Marketplaces, plural. There are already many of them, and each of them offers vast numbers of available agents. Before you ask the question, how do I find the right agents for my purposes? you’ll need to answer two other questions:

• What exactly are my purposes? In other words, what do I want agents to accomplish for me?
• Which Agentic Marketplaces make the most sense for me?

You will be best served to answer the first question by learning what agents are actually capable of doing for you, making it more of a process of selection than creation. This will be a much less threatening, and much more productive approach.

To prepare yourself to answer the second question, you’ll probably need to do some searching. Here’s an incomplete guide to places to search.

Vendor-Centric Agent Marketplaces

• Microsoft offers The Microsoft Agent Store, which is a marketplace within Microsoft 365 Copilot where users can discover, install, and use AI-powered agents to enhance their productivity. It is to agents what the Microsoft AppSource is to software applications. Microsoft Partners must satisfy significant requirements to post their creations to these marketplaces, so end-users enjoy greater assurance of quality and of usability. It can be reached by clicking “Get Agents” on the right side-panel of Microsoft 365 Copilot. Agents are also available on the Microsoft Azure Marketplace.
• Google’s AI Agents Space is currently only available through allowlist. To apply for access to it visit https://cloud.google.com/resources/google-agentspace.
• Salesforce offers AgentExchange, the complement to their AppExchange, calling it "The trusted Agentforce marketplace for ready-to-use agent actions and templates."
• Amazon Web Services offers the AWS Marketplace, which features agents.
• ServiceNow offers The Agentic AI Marketplace, which offers the opportunity to "Put AI to work with the new ServiceNow Store, where you'll find trusted integrations, applications, offerings, and solutions—plus new industry- and domain- specific AI Agents.​"

There are others, but they are all in very preliminary stages with very specific access requirements. This is very likely to change quickly.

AI Agent General Stores

• The most aptly named in this category is the AI Agent Store, which delivers daily AI agent news right on the home page and offers visitors the opportunity to browse available AI agents, list AI agents they’ve created making them available for sale, and find an AI automation agency.
• Conversate AI offers industry specific AI Agents that are pictured right on the home page. They offer their AI Agent Marketplace as "a platform that connects businesses with Conversational AI Autonomous Agents capable of handling sales, customer service, and technical support across various channels such as phone, SMS, email, webchat, and social media." They also develop custom AI agents.
• Agent.ai, which is advertised as developed by HubSpot, but was really developed by HubSpot's owner, presents itself as "The #1 Professional Network for AI Agents, where professionals build, find, and use AI agents that get real work done." 'Nuff said!
• Lindy.ai, although not truly a marketplace, offers templates to get users started building their own agents, and offers to create custom agents for you.

AI Agent Aggregators

For those who are fans of one-stop shopping, these aggregators make it easy for you to try multiple tools, flexibly providing direct access to each bot or agent. Be prepared to spend significant time on these as exploration easily becomes addiction.

• Poe provides a platform from which users can access any of the major models, such as ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Llama, Grok, Mistral, Qwen, and others in all their varieties, levels, and flavors. They also offer a wide variety of ready-to-go bots and agents created by anyone who cares to post them. Making life even easier they break these agents down into dozens of categories including "Reasoning Bots," "Search Bots," "mage Generation Bots," "Audio and Video Bots," and others. Instead of having to visit multiple sites to sign up for each of these, Poe users subscribe to a specific number of "points" per day which enable the use of anything on the site. Convenient. Controllable? Expensive? You determine that.

• AI Agents Directory calls its catalog the AI Agents Market Landscape. The list of categories is much larger than Poe, and much more functionally specific. At the time of this writing, the Market Landscape contained 1,453 agents spanning 65 categories. See what I mean about planning to spend some time? They even feature a Leaderboard and Battleboard which may help you more quickly identify which agents and models you’d like to explore first. Also, there’s an Agent Arena where you can "battle AI Agents head-to-head."

• AgentVerse, perhaps the cleanest website I’ve ever visited, right now boasts 2.65 million agents lists and 128 million messages exchanged. There’s only one item listed on the top navigation bar next to the "Sign In" button called "Docs" which takes you to extensive information about the site. Otherwise, you immediately see Claude, OpenAI, Google, and a continuing list of available Agents to explore

These should be enough to keep you busy for a while. Please take it from me, you don’t want to get hooked on the search. You might not find yourself having time for much else.

The good news is that the agents that will benefit you most are out there. The challenge is digging through everything to find them. When you do, please tell us about it in the comments below!