Think fast

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

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

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

What are Enterprise Chatbots? In-Depth Guide

Enterprise chatbots are fast becoming a critical part of successful digital transformation strategies in large organizations. Service portfolios are more complex than ever, cutting across a huge variety of internal departments, processes, and tooling. At the same time, there’s a more urgent need than ever to establish efficient workflows without compromising on security. Today, we’re exploring one option for dealing with these competing challenges by diving deep into how enterprise chatbots offer a scalable solution for streamlining access to services.

Ronan McQuillan

May 1, 2025

What are Digital Workers? + Examples

Digital workers are a concept that’s been around for quite some time now. But, in recent years they’ve sprung back to the fore, taking on a whole new meaning in the context of the AI revolution. The idea of replacing human activities with computerized systems isn’t new. What is changing, though, is the kind of work that can be handled without requiring a real-life human being. Of course, this also represents a huge opportunity for early adopters.

Ronan McQuillan

Apr 29, 2025

6 Low/No-Code AI Agent Builders

AI agents are probably the hottest tech topic around today. In almost all industries, software vendors have rushed to add agentic workflow tools to their platforms over the past few years. At the same time, several stand-alone tools have come to market for creating AI agents. Today, we’re zooming in on an important segment of this space by checking out the top low/no-code AI agent builders. See, agentic AI systems are highly complex, and building them from scratch is well beyond the means of most non-developers.

Ronan McQuillan

Apr 25, 2025

6 Open-Source AI Agent Platforms

There’s a huge amount of hype around AI agents. Every day, we hear new reasons why they’re going to transform just about all aspects of daily life. But, practical information about how to make this a reality is less forthcoming. The biggest question here is, how can we build agentic solutions of our own? Today, we’re exploring an important subset of this by checking out the market for open-source agent builders.

Ronan McQuillan

Apr 23, 2025