Exploring Jotform AI Agents

Introduction

AI has become one of the biggest tools for making people's everyday lives easier. One example of this is Jotform’s AI Agent, a tool designed to help individuals and organizations manage conversations, answer questions, and assist users without constant manual input.

Business owners, educators, and hobbyists can use this AI Agent to handle specific tasks. For example, if you’re a teacher looking for a way to help students with their homework when you’re unavailable, you can create an AI Agent to provide quick responses and support without you being present or you can set up an AI Agent to assist in scheduling one on one sessions for you and your student. As for the business side, Jotform’s AI Agent can help with assisting customers through quick questions they have about your business like pricing or time availability and more. 

In this blog, we’ll deep dive into how Jotform’s AI Agent works, its potential use cases, and I’ll walk you through how to set up your own Jotform AI Agent.

 

Example of the drag-and-drop interface Jotform offers when making forms.

What is Jotform?

After reading the introduction I’m sure you’re wondering, what is Jotform? Jotform is an online platform that offers a free form builder to help businesses and people who have no coding knowledge create and manage forms. These forms can range from surveys, applications, payment, contracts, registration forms, and more. Jotform’s drag and drop interface allows users to quickly edit the form to their needs and liking.

 

How Jotform AI Agents Work

Now, let’s dive into how Jotform’s AI Agents actually work. These Agents use machine learning and natural language processing (NLP) to make decisions.

 

Jotform’s train tab, here you can upload files to help train your AI Agent.

To get started, you need to train your AI Agent by feeding it information. For example, if you own a restaurant and want your Agent to help customers with menu questions, you can upload your full menu to Jotform using the “Train” tab. When you upload your menu you can tell the AI Agent how they can use it. In this situation we can have the AI Agent use the information on the menu when a customer asks for a price on a specific dish.

Here I uploaded a menu and told the AI Agent to use the menu to respond to customers about pricing and available dishes.

 

Another way to train your agent can be through the “Teach Your Agent” tab. Here you can directly tell your agent what you want it to know. I think this is the best way to train your agent because it gives clarity on what you want and what important knowledge you want the agent to know.

 

 

Here I am telling the agent the price of smothered chicken and the agent checks back with me to ensure that the pricing I gave her was correct. As I talk to the agent it first gathers input from me, like messages and images and then it uses its embedded algorithms to analyze the given input and determine the best way to respond.

This is what the call interface looks like when talking to an AI Agent

Types of AI Agents

Jotform offers two different key ways their AI Agents can be used. They can be used as an online chatbot for back and forth messaging or as a phone agent. These agents can be used on platforms like SMS, WhatsApp, Messenger,  Zoom, or Gmail. Users have the option to choose to publish their own personalized Agent App. The personal agent app can be best for providing customers with instant engagement, instead of them having to access a website they can quickly access the app. These two forms of human-AI interaction serve different purposes and can lead to different outcomes. Chatbot AI Agents are ideal for virtual assistants or customer support roles, where the focus is building trust, empathy, and smooth communication for users. In contrast, phone AI Agents can be good for quickly handling repetitive tasks like “What are today’s lunch specials?” or providing fast answers on a customer's order status.

 

Agent Limitations

While AI Agents offer benefits such as enhanced efficiency, 24/7 availability, cost reduction, and scalability, they also lack human empathy, risk errors and misinterpretations, and can frustrate customers due to automation. Let’s break down some of the issues first, and then we’ll see how Jotform provides some tools to mitigate these potential limitations :

 

• Human Empathy: The AI can struggle to replicate a human agent's emotional intelligence. This can create a struggle between the AI Agent and the customer. The customer may be frustrated and in need of human interaction in a sensitive situation which can lead the customer to more frustration. Although this remains a risk, you can train the AI model to sense these frustrations and redirect the customer to a human agent to make things easier. Imagine a customer reaches out to their bank after noticing suspicious activity on their account, the customer may be feeling anxious or upset and looking for human reassurance. When they reach out, they get connected to an AI agent that responds with cold generic messages like “Please allow 2-3 business days for review” can feel dismissive. To provide an alternative, you can include an option for the customer to connect to a human agent, or ask for a call back number from the customer tell them that a human agent will contact that as soon as possible.

• Risk of Errors and Misinterpretation: AI is not comfortable with human slang or human error like typos or lack of detail. This can lead the AI to giving the user an unwanted response that does not directly answer the customer's question. For instance, if a customer types “wat is on menu” instead of “What do you have on your menu?”, the AI might not recognize what the customer is saying due to the slang and typos. Instead of listing out the menu items the AI can do something unexpected. 

Here I asked the agent “wat is on menu” and it somehow took that as me asking it to switch the language to Dutch.

When I properly ask the agent “What is on your menu?” the agent gives me a straightforward response, which answers my question.

• Automation Frustration: AI can get very repetitive with its responses, these responses can be irrelevant to the customers needs. This repetition can cause frustration to the customer causing them more distress than they may have had before. For example, say a customer loses their debit card late at night and needs to immediately report their lost debit card to their bank, and an automated chat bot agent immediately pops up offering assistance. However, instead of recognizing the urgency, the bot suggests unrelated services like applying for a new credit card or activating a card. The customer may try to clarify the situation to the agent but the bot continues to misunderstand. This kind of interaction can leave customers feeling helpless and frustrated, especially when dealing with time-sensitive issues. 

Jotform’s training tab while building an agent

Solution to Potential Risk

Although risks like these may arise, Jotform allows you to train the AI model to help with these kinds of situations. You can train your AI model to sense these frustrations and can have the AI do something like redirect the customer to a human agent to make things easier. This can be done in the actions section in the training page. The training page is where your AI Agent’s emotions and knowledge on what you need them for comes into play. 

For example, if I own a restaurant and my customer has a negative response or feedback to their time at my restaurant I can have the AI Agent offer to transfer the customer to a human agent, to ensure the interaction is safely taken care of. 

The agent replies to the customer based on the knowledge we feed it. When the customer expresses that they are frustrated by saying “I am frustrated”. The agent then redirects the customer to a human agent, just the way we trained it to.

Subscriptions

Jotform’s yearly payment plan, ranging from a free tier to bronze, silver, gold, and then enterprise which is a custom payment plan.

Jotform offers 5 different pricing models, ranging from Starter, which is free, to Enterprise. With enterprise the user is allowed to send in a quote of how many agents, minutes, and features they prefer and Jotform reaches back out with a price , this is designed for organizations needing advanced features and high limits. The starter plan is good for someone just testing the waters, it’s ideal for small projects or individuals. The bronze plan is good for organizations and business that are growing and expecting a bit more traffic, while silver, gold, and enterprise are best for organizations and 

businesses who have a lot of customer engagement and a larger customer base.

 

Designing the Agent

Jotform’s designer tab allows you to add in your own color scheme, upload a photo of your own agent avatar, or generate one. Here I am designing my AI agent with a pre-designed support request AI agent.

Designing an AI Agent with Jotform is pretty straightforward. They offer different approaches like starting from scratch and building your agent from the ground up, choosing from pre-designed templates to get started quickly, or creating an AI Clone to replicate your personal knowledge. All of these features allow you to design your AI agent to your liking. You can edit the agent avatar, the background, and the color scheme in the avatar section of the designer tab. 

 

Jotform offers a gallery of different AI agent avatars. Ranging from human avatars to cartoons.

Jotform also offers a generate feature, to generate your AI agent avatar using AI. Here I gave the AI a simple prompt, “A man holding a pen and paper with a smile on his face”. The avatar generation is very good for the simple prompt I gave it. 

Lastly, you can choose to upload your own photo. Say if you have a mascot or specific person you want to use to make your avatar personal you can do that here.

Here is an example of me changing the color scheme to light and dark purples.

 

Styling is also done in the designer tab, with styling we can change the background color, the background image, the agent's name, role, font, and whether you want the layout to be left or right. 

 

Here I switched the position of the AI Agent to the left and changed the name to “Bob the  Bunny” as well as the background image.

Getting Started with Jotform’s AI Agent’s

1. Sign up with Jotform

To sign up with Jotform, follow these steps:

1. Access the Jotform homepage: start at the Jotform homepage using this link: https://www.jotform.com

 

 

2. Create an Account: sign up with your preferred email to create your account

 

2. Setting up workspace

To access Jotform’s AI agent workspace follow these steps:

1. Press create: click the orange or white create button

2. Press “AI Agent”: Press the AI Agent button to be directed to creating an agent

1. Create an AI Agent: Here you can select how you’d like to select your agent. I will be selecting “Use Template”.

2. Pick your agent: Select which AI Agent template you’d like to use. Here I am selecting the “Customer Support AI Agent”.

     3. Build your Agent

1. Select your avatar: use the gallery, generate an avatar, or upload a picture to create your AI Agent avatar.

2. Change the agent's name: use the style tab to edit your agents name to your preference. Here I chose to name my agent “Rhett the Fox”.

3. Pick your colors: use the style tab to change the color scheme. I selected the green theme.

4. Select your background: use the style tab to customize the chats background. You can also just select a color. 

3. Train your agent

  This is where your agent will learn how to handle customers.

1. Getting Started: navigate to the “train” tab

2. Teach the agent: press the “add new knowledge” button in the “knowledge base” tab. This is how we will train our agent.

3. Give information: now you can pick how you want to feed your agent information. You can upload files, a link, or give the agent text based knowledge.

4. Give a prompt: I am training my model using a prompt. Here I am explaining what company the AI is representing and our contact information

4. Shape your Agent:

Use Jotforms training to give your agent rules to regulate how they talk and act

1. AI Persona: navigate to the AI Persona tab in the Train Section

2. Set the Tone: use the “Tone of Voice” dropdown to set the tone of your AI Agent. The Agent can be friendly, casual, or professional.

3. Chat Guidelines: here you can set rules for the agent to follow during their conversation with a customer.

4. Pick your agent's voice: navigate to the voice tab in AI Persona. 

• Press “change” to look through the agent voice options. Pick the voice that fits best for you.

5. Publish your agent: 

This is the final step to building your AI agent, this is how you can make your         agent accessible to customers.

1. Publish Tab: navigate to the publish tab

2. Pick your platform: here I will be using a link to share my agent.

• Using a link: to use a link to share your agent just click the “copy link” button, you can then use this link to attach to your website or share with customers.

• Chatbot Agent: in the chatbot agent tab Jotform provides code to embed the agent into your site. Here is how it would look:

Your agent can be on the bottom right of your site page, ready to be    used by the customer whenever.

Jotform AI Agent: An easy manageable tool 

After exploring Jotform’s AI Agent platform, it’s clear that it does well at simplifying tasks like customer support, scheduling, and workflow automation. I also found that Jotform does a good job at giving users an easy way to build, train, and publish their AI Agents. Their build and training tools are very straightforward and are easy for anyone who has or does not have coding knowledge. 

But as with many AI-drive tools, the limitations show when you go beyond structured tasks. I noticed that conversations between the AI Agent can start to feel robotic, repetitive, and its emotional intelligence is limited. An AI Agent can also lack the emotion to handle a customer during emotional or frustrated situations. 

That said, Jotform is doing a good job at paving the way for more accessible AI integrations. It’s a glimpse into how automcation can support us, but not replace us. By handling repetitive tasks and freeing up time for deeper human connection these AI Agents can be deemed as useful.