Explore AI Tools - Agents

You have likely heard the term AI agents or Agentic AI. These refer to AI tools that can perform tasks on your behalf by combining instructions, context, and automation to offer a more tailored experience. 

Unlike a standard AI chatbot that simply responds to questions, agents can be created and stored, follow multi‑step workflows, monitor for new information, and take action based on the goals you set. Agents typically fall into a few different categories including: retrieval agents (find and summarize information from trusted sources), analysis agents (reason over data and produce insights), workflow/tool agents (trigger actions across apps and complete multi‑step tasks), and monitoring agents (watch for changes or new updates and alert you). Many real‑world agents blend these capabilities to draft materials, surface insights, and move work forward with minimal manual effort. 

For political campaigns, the value is simple: agents help overstretched teams get more done with less manual effort. They can accelerate research, summarize large volumes of public information, draft content that a staffer can then refine, and free up time for higher‑impact strategy and voter engagement. Agents are particularly effective for tasks that are repetitive, time‑sensitive, or require synthesizing information across multiple sources.

It may be beyond the scope of most campaigns to create and implement sophisticated agents. However, there are some platform-based agent tools in the leading AI platforms that could provide useful functionality for campaign teams. They can be highly task‑specific while also designed to be simple, secure, and more powerful than a general chat experience. 

In Microsoft 365 Copilot, built‑in agents such as Researcher and Analyst go beyond standard conversational prompts. These agents are optimized for multi-step reasoning, evidence gathering, and data synthesis, and  with the option to leverage models from ChatGPT and Anthropic (Claude) to deliver higher‑fidelity outputs. Researcher can pull together structured briefs from public information and long documents you provide, while Analyst is built to interpret complex spreadsheets, extract insights, and identify patterns in campaign‑relevant data. 

Google’s Gemini offers a similar, ready-made agent experience called Gems inside the Gemini interface. In Gems you can give instructions and define roles and objectives as well as connect tools to act on the information retrieved to specify outputs.

These pre-built options, inside of platforms that you are already using, help campaigns adopt agent-like workflows (from multi-step research tasks to analysis across multiple datasets) quickly, safely, and with minimal setup.

From a security standpoint, if you are building your own agents, remember that agents can take action so treat them like a new team member: give them the minimum access needed (least privilege) and avoid connecting sensitive systems or data unless it’s truly required. Build in clear human approval points for any outward-facing communications, data changes, or automated actions so a staffer reviews and signs off before anything happens.