Think fast
Thoughts and ideas on how to build tools, automate workflows and speed-up the workplace.
10 Agentic AI Use Cases
Agentic AI is probably the hottest topic in the world of enterprise IT. In fact, software vendors in just about every niche have added agentic AI features to their products over the past couple of years. However, in the real world, adopting AI agents isn’t such a straightforward process. On the one hand, many teams struggle to determine the right tools for their needs in a fast-evolving market. On the other hand, in their rush to roll out solutions, some companies lose sight of the need for provable ROI.
Ronan McQuillan
May 23, 2025
5 Flowise Alternatives & Competitors for 2025
In the past few years, several tools have come to market, aiming to simplify and expedite the process of building AI agents. Flowise is one of the most successful entrants into this space, offering a primarily visual experience for creating, deploying, and managing agentic systems. This includes low-code tools that enable us to drag and drop configurable elements to determine agent behavior. This has helped to position Flowise as a popular option for developers and non-developers alike, as interest in agentic AI has exploded.
Ronan McQuillan
May 21, 2025
What is Tool Calling?
Currently, interest in agentic AI is exploding. IT teams in all industries are rushing to implement solutions that utilize autonomous agents to power workflows. This not only requires AI models that can perform reasoning, but ones that can also take action based on this. That’s where tool calling comes in. Tool calling, also sometimes referred to as function calling, is what enables an agentic AI system to interact with connected tools, services, and resources in order to perform tasks within workflows.
Ronan McQuillan
May 19, 2025
5 Open-Source Zapier Alternatives for 2025
Zapier is one of the best-known automation tools on the market today. Offering a highly visual experience for connecting a wide range of external platforms, it powers all sorts of workflows in countless organizations. However, despite its popularity, Zapier isn’t suitable for all use cases. Today, we’re examining one of the most important segments of the workflow automation market by checking out some of the top open-source Zapier alternatives. Along the way, we’ll check out some of the key decision points when selecting an integration and automation platform, as well as outlining the most prominent open-source vendors in this space.
Ronan McQuillan
May 15, 2025
6 Self-Hosted & Local LLMs
With fast-advancing technology, running AI models locally is no longer the preserve of massive enterprises or researchers. Today, smaller businesses and even hobbyists are also leveraging self-hosted LLMs within development projects. Thanks to advances in model quantization, local runtimes and runners, and smaller yet highly capable models, it’s increasingly viable to run LLMs in cloud containers or even consumer hardware. But, of course, this introduces a range of challenges. One of the biggest is choosing the right model for our needs.
Ronan McQuillan
May 14, 2025
6 Moveworks Alternatives & Competitors for 2025
More and more businesses are leveraging AI within mission-critical internal workflows. This includes a range of internal services across IT, finance, HR, operations, and other departments. To meet this need, a range of vendors have come to the fore, offering streamlined tools for implementing LLM-powered processes. Today, we’re exploring one practical angle on this by checking out some of the top Moveworks alternatives that are currently available on the market.
Ronan McQuillan
May 12, 2025
What are NLP Applications? + 5 Real-World Examples
Natural language processing is revolutionizing the way humans interact with software tools. Not only that, the increasing prevalence of AI is opening up the door to a huge range of transformative use cases that would be almost impossible with traditional automation tools. Of course, this isn’t news. We constantly hear how AI is reshaping just about all aspects of how businesses operate. Today, we’re thinking about this in more practical terms by checking out some of the most prevalent NLP applications that you can build and deploy right now.
Ronan McQuillan
May 9, 2025
10 Open-Source LLMs
AI is becoming an integral part of more and more software projects. However, building effective, production-ready solutions relies on having the right model to power our application. Naturally, this requires us to determine which model is best positioned to meet our technical requirements. Depending on our needs, this will either mean embedding the model in our app, or calling out to an external model via its API or MCP server.
Ronan McQuillan
May 7, 2025