The 6 best AI agents for business

Agentic artificial intelligence (AI) is taking the business world by storm. According to McKinsey’s 2025 State of AI Survey, 62% of respondents say their organizations are experimenting with AI agents, with 23% already scaling at least one system.

That said, the AI agent landscape is still evolving rapidly as platforms continue racing to develop the technology. As a result, it’s often challenging to determine which solutions are worth investing in and which may need more time to mature.

To help you cut through the noise, this guide explores the best AI agents for business in 2026. We’ll cover a diverse mix of options across use cases, including financial management, customer support, general business admin, and sales.

1. Zeni's Agents: Finance and Accounting

Zeni is an AI-powered platform built to meet all your accounting and finance needs in one place. Our comprehensive suite of offerings combines intelligent automation with expert support, providing everything from AI bookkeeping to fractional CFO services.

Built into Zeni’s platform is a growing list of AI agents that work as a seamless digital finance team, helping you streamline complex tasks and make smarter strategic decisions. These include:

• AI Accountant Agent: Handles core accounting work like categorization, reconciliations, and reporting, keeping your books accurate and up to date.
• AI CFO Agent: Delivers strategic insights, financial forecasting, and high-level guidance to help you plan for growth and manage cash flow effectively.
• AI Bill Pay Agent: Automates accounts payable workflows, ensuring vendors are paid on time while maintaining visibility into outgoing cash.
• AI Expense Agent: Tracks and categorizes expenses in real time, reducing manual work and improving accuracy across your financial records.
• AI Card Agent: Manages corporate card activity, monitors spending, and simplifies reconciliation across your team.

Coming soon, we’ll expand our lineup with the AI Banking Agent. It’s designed to automatically sync with your bank accounts, match transactions, and streamline the recurring reconciliation process.

Our agents are available at no additional cost as part of our AI-powered bookkeeping subscription, which starts at just $494 per month. 

You’ll also gain access to Zeni’s broader financial stack, including a business checking account, corporate credit card, and employee reimbursement tool.

2. Intercom’s Fin: Customer Support

Intercom is a leading customer service platform that can help you manage and scale your support processes. You can use it to build a help center and centralize customer engagement across digital channels, like chat and email.

Fin is Intercom’s AI customer support agent. It automatically references the knowledge base in your help center to provide natural language answers to customer inquiries and resolve a significant portion of incoming tickets.

Tip: If you sign up for the Fin Guarantee Success Program and fail to achieve a resolution rate of at least 65%, Intercom claims it will pay you $1M.

Beyond answering questions, you can teach Fin to take actions independently, like updating user account details or issuing refunds. Over time, Fin can also identify gaps in your documentation based on customer interaction and suggest updates.

Pricing starts at $29 per seat, per month, plus $0.99 per resolution, which is one of the most commonly noted drawbacks. Costs can quickly balloon with high ticket volumes, especially since there are no bulk discounts. 

However, Intercom does offer a two-week free trial and significant discounts for startups. If you qualify, you could receive 90% off your first year, 50% off in your second year, and 25% off in your third. That equates to 300, 150, and 75 free Fin resolutions.

3. Cognition’s Devin: Software Engineering

Cognition is an applied AI lab whose mission is to expand the reasoning capacity of agentic AI tools. It aims to apply those increased capabilities to a wide range of disciplines and industries, starting with coding work.

The lab’s flagship product is named Devin, released in 2024 and marketed as the first AI software engineer. It works in its own development environment, with access to a code editor, terminal, and browser.

In other words, the Devin AI model has everything it needs to operate like a human engineer. Once you assign it a task, it can plan the approach, write the necessary code, run tests, and deploy the result autonomously.

In addition, Devin can collaborate like any other member of the software team. For example, it can report on its progress in real time and incorporate any feedback you provide on the fly, making it easy to work together on design choices.

The first pricing tier lets you pay as you go for Agent Compute Units (ACUs), which are like tokens to initiate its AI workflows. At this tier, ACUs cost $2.25 apiece, and you must buy them in increments of $20.

Alternatively, you can pay a flat $500 per month for 250 ACUs, reducing the price to $2.00 per unit. Either way, you get unlimited seats, but the pay-as-you-go plan only allows for up to 10 concurrent sessions.

If neither plan works for your business, custom enterprise pricing is available.

4. Zapier Agents: General Business Workflows

Zapier is one of the largest automation platforms on the market, connecting 8,000+ apps in a single ecosystem. You can use it to share data, trigger actions, and streamline workflows across the world’s most popular systems.

Zapier Agents leverage the platform’s massive scale, giving you access to agentic AI that can operate across all of the tools in its integration stack. In other words, you can use Zapier to implement AI automation across countless small business workflows.

The AI agent platform includes dozens of prebuilt templates to help you get started quickly. For example, some of these include:

• Automated Sales Lead Emails: Creates personalized sales emails by pulling information from a website.
• Compliance Review Agent: Evaluates requests for compliance based on current policies and regulations.
• YouTube Shorts Creator: Automates the process of creating and uploading engaging Shorts from longer video content.

While these templates can be useful out of the box, they often have a relatively narrow use case. Fortunately, Zapier also has a custom AI agent builder that lets you build your own with help from the Zapier Copilot, similar to the Microsoft Copilot Studio.

Unlike some conversational AI agent platforms, Zapier offers a free plan. It includes up to 400 monthly “activities,” which are actions your agent takes, like performing a web search or answering a question using a knowledge source.

Paid plans start at $33.33 per month for 1,500 activities, with custom enterprise pricing available on request.

5. Lindy: Email Administration 

Lindy is an AI agent designed to handle day-to-day administrative work, with a particular focus on email and calendar management. In other words, it functions like a virtual AI assistant, saving you time by managing repetitive tasks like:

• Managing your inbox and drafting replies in your voice
• Scheduling meetings and providing context to help you prepare
• Recording calls, taking detailed notes, and crafting follow-up emails 

Using machine learning, Lindy can study your data and adapt to your preferences. It also integrates with hundreds of apps beyond email, like Google Sheets, Airtable, and Calendly, allowing it to plug directly into your daily business operations.

Conveniently, your primary means of interacting with Lindy is through iMessage, emulating a human agent. For example, you can simply send it a text asking it to schedule a meeting or draft a response, and it will handle the task for you.

Lindy offers a free trial for seven days, after which pricing starts at a flat $49.99 per month. There’s no increase for usage volume, making costs predictable, and you can cancel at any time without penalty.

To apply Lindy at scale, you can also upgrade to an enterprise plan. This unlocks additional features for larger organizations, like team settings, dedicated phone support, and HIPAA-compliant security.

6. 11x’s Alice and Julian: Sales and Marketing

11x is a research company focused on building AI agents that can assist revenue teams. More specifically, it aims to automate the most repetitive sales processes to help businesses scale faster and more efficiently.

11x’s roster includes two generative AI agents. Alice is the outbound specialist, designed to automate top-of-funnel activities. That includes researching leads in your market, identifying top prospects, and engaging them with personalized messaging.

Meanwhile, Julian is 11x’s inbound sales representative, specializing in mid-funnel workflow automation. For example, the AI solution can respond instantly to inquiries and qualify leads using your criteria before routing them to your team.

Together, Alice and Julian can create a seamless sales, marketing, and growth solution. Instead of handing leads off between disconnected tools, they maintain context from the first touchpoint through to qualification, reducing friction in your pipeline.

As a result, 11x has managed to achieve some impressive results. For example, that allegedly includes increasing qualified meetings by 1.5x for MMB Networks and generating a $1M pipeline in three months for Questex.

Unfortunately, 11x doesn’t publicly share its pricing, so you’ll have to inquire directly to get an understanding of the platform’s actual costs. However, pricing isn’t a key feature in customer reviews, so it may not be a notable drawback.

How to choose the right AI agent for your needs

AI agent technology is still in its early days, and solutions are evolving rapidly. As a result, it can be tricky to determine which platforms will actually benefit your business and which will turn out to be a waste of valuable resources.

Here’s a step-by-step framework you can use to help cut through the noise and find the best AI agent for your business:

• Define your use cases: Don’t try to automate everything at once. Start by identifying one or two high-impact areas where agentic automation could save time or reduce costs and focus your efforts there.
• Get firsthand referrals: Since this space is so new, marketing claims often outpace reality. Consider reaching out to your industry peers for recommendations and insight into tools they’ve actually used.
• Consider customer reviews: There may not be a sufficient volume for every AI tool, but some leading platforms have a healthy number of user reviews. Recurring patterns in these can tell you a lot about the average experience.
• Take advantage of free trials: There’s often no way to know for sure how well these solutions will work for your business without experiencing them yourself. Fortunately, many platforms offer trials or limited free plans.
• Be prepared to pivot: Avoid locking yourself into long-term contracts too early. Autonomous AI agents are improving rapidly, and today’s cutting-edge tools may be replaced with better options in a matter of months.

If you’re looking for a good place to start, Zeni offers a practical entry point. Our AI agents can automate costly finance and accounting workflows, significantly reducing manual work and helping you make better-informed strategic decisions.

Schedule a free demo today to see Zeni’s agents in action.

‍