Personal AI x Agentic AI = Elna, a game-changer
Marco van Hurne
I build AI companies | Data Science Strategist @ Beyond the Cloud | Data Strategy Certified | AI Compliance Officer Certified
"The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams." - Eleanor Roosevelt
Here's the TL;DR
Elna AI is a game-changing combination of Personal AI (a second brain) x Agentic AI (which can do stuff on your behalf), and it's fun to play with and there's no coding required. Just set up a knowledge base, connect to external services, and configure the agent's prompts. It's customizing your own mini-me robot, minus the wires and metal parts.
It is AI-agents time. As you know, I have already spent 13 or so articles on this subject (see bottom of this article, for all episodes), and the subject never stops being intriguing, simply because the market is moving so quickly. This will be the year when AI-agent platforms will be so simple to operate for all of us, so you can ask them to perform actions on your behalf, like search for vacations and list your top 10, book one and pay for it. At the same you will see more and more interest for so-called personal Agents, that know who you are, what your preferences are and will act alongside with AI-Agents for various tasks. The market for personal agents will be big, and the first strides have already been made (think of Character.ai , which is currently drawing 20% of what Google is getting as traffic ).
So next year, when you will be searching for your next vacation, just ask Character, and it will connect with a travel AI-assistant, and search for the best fit, based on your previous preferences (which it infered from the collective knowledge on your computer, phone, cloud storage, etc.), and present it to you. You verbally acknowledge, and it will book, AND pay for it on your behalf.
Do you think that we will still be needing websites in this Agentic age? An AI-Agent does not need to have a visual interface - a UI, nor a "user" experience - it just needs access to the travel data, maybe a "deal" here and there, and voila.
Now, on my journey to understand more and more about the possibilities of Agentic AI, and build some of them myself, at the same time, I just came across this agentic platform called ELNA.AI .
And the cool thing of this platform is, that it IS the first combination of PERSONAL AI + AGENTIC AI, AND that it is a lot of FUN just to play with.
Before we start!
If you like this topic and you want to support me:
The funny thing about Elna is that you can see the first strides they are making, integrating personal AI, with Agentic AI. You can pick an avatar, with an agentic function to begin with. These avatars have a prebuilt agentic function. For instance a bot that advises you in crypto trading, a Morgan Freeman bot (whatever that may do), you name it. You can build your own bots as well, and buy or sell them on their marketplace. The AI agents on Elna are more than just chatbots. They can do all sorts of tasks on their own, like managing your social media, analyzing financial data, and even screening for telemedicine. It's like having a super-smart assistant that never sleeps.
Their philosophy
The folks behind ELNA, like Arun, and Alex, and the rest of the team, are professionals when it comes to AI and blockchain. They started this whole thing to "democratize AI" and make it more transparent and secure (hence the blockchain).
So, what can you do on ELNA?
You can pick, or create your own AI agents using their no-code tools.This AI-agent can perform actions on your behalf. You can even sell your AI agents on their marketplace. But ELNA is more than a pretty AI-agent platform. They want to collaborate with the developer community. You can list and monetize your AI tools and models on their platform.
The latter for me does not make that much sense at first glance, but I have not had the chance to speak with the founders yet. Check out their whitepaper and other official docs to see what they've got planned for the future. Neat.
What really sets ELNA apart is their focus on crypto and blockchain. They run on the Internet Computer Protocol (ICP), which makes sure that all the AI stuff happening on the platform is secure and decentralized.
They are luckily NOT into crypto TRADING.
As Andrew Ng once said, "AI is the new electricity." And ELNA is like the power plant that's making it all happen.
If you want to learn more about Ela, and how it works, just continue to read the rest of the article below. It's a game-changer.
Elna walkthrough
In this walkthrough, I am going to create a social media manager for an imaginary actor named Alexander Sterling. Think of it as a digital twin, managing his Twitter profile, posting replies, and engaging with followers all on its own.
And it's easy to do
First things first, we need to give our AI agent a brain.
That's where the knowledge base comes in. I have prepared a document that covers Alexander's life story, hobbies, and opinions on various topics. This will be the foundation for the AI's responses. The more detailed and organized the knowledge base is, the better the AI will be at generating relevant and accurate replies.
Next up, let's connect the AI agent to Alexander's Twitter account.
Don't worry, you don't need to be a developer for this.
I only use the Twitter developer account APIs to link the AI with the Twitter profile. And once that is done, the AI can automatically reply to tweets and engage with followers.
领英推荐
It's a 24/7 social media assistant!
Let's jump into the platform and start building my AI agent from scratch.
As mentioned before, you need to give it a name and write a biography and description. The description is a quick summary of what the agent does, which will show up on the marketplace. The biography is where we'll put in step-by-step prompts to guide the AI's replies.
After that, you need to upload the knowledge base you prepared earlier.
This is a PDF file with all the juicy details about your AI-Agent. Elna will connect this document to their vector embedding and database, and make sure the AI has access to all the info it needs to generate its context sensitive replies.
The cooles part to me, is that Elna lets you connect the AI agent to all sorts of external services, like Twitter, WhatsApp, or even automation tools like IFTTT (I forgot the name of this acronym, but its mainly used for home automation).
To make a Twitter link happen, you we need to generate some tokens and API keys.
It sounds technical, but it's not too bad.
First create an app in the Twitter developer account (f** X), and grab the necessary details, like the Twitter handle, bearer token, API key, and secret key. Then, you will have to plug these into the Ela platform to finish the integration.
Developer Account
Developer Platform
Now for the moment of truth - testing our AI agent!
I will be tagging Alexander Sterling from a personal account and ask him a question related to the info in the knowledge base.
Something like, "Just saw your latest movie. How do you prep for such intense roles?"
The tag will trigger the API to connect to Twitter, and the tweet will be sent to the prompt engine for analysis. The prompt engine will then use the knowledge base to whip up a reply based on the prompts we provided earlier.
If I did everything right, I should get an instant reply from the AI agent, posing as Alexander Sterling.
So creating an AI agent is pretty straightforward. Set up a knowledge base, connect to external services, and configure the agent's prompts. Voila
Well, that's a wrap for today. Tomorrow, I'll have a fresh episode of TechTonic Shifts for you. If you enjoy my writing and want to support my work, feel free to buy me a coffee ??
Think a friend would enjoy this too? Share the newsletter and let them join the conversation. LinkedIn appreciates your likes by making my articles available to more readers.
Signing off - Marco
13 Previous articles on Agentic AI