How to Set Up Your First AI Agent for Your Business (No Code)

You’ve read about what agentic AI actually is and you’ve scanned the tools. Now you want to build something. This post walks you through one complete workflow, start to finish, using Make.com. No code. No IT department. About 10 minutes.

The workflow: a missed-enquiry follow-up agent. Someone fills in your contact form. Within five minutes, they get a personalised reply. Their details land in a spreadsheet. If you haven’t followed up personally within 24 hours, you get flagged.

Why this use case? Because speed wins leads. A Harvard Business Review and MIT study found that responding to an enquiry within five minutes makes you 21 times more likely to qualify that lead than if you wait 30 minutes. Separately, research by LeadAngel found the first business to respond wins 78% of the time. Not the cheapest, not the best reviewed. The fastest.

Most small business owners respond in hours, not minutes. That’s the gap this agent closes.

Why Make.com? It’s visual, it’s cheap (plans start at US$9/month, less than most coffee subscriptions), and it connects to virtually every app a small business uses. You don’t write a single line of code.

What you need before you start

• A Make.com account (free tier works for this)
• A contact form on your website (Gravity Forms, WPForms, Typeform, or similar)
• A Gmail or Outlook account to send the follow-up email
• A Google Sheet to log enquiries (make a blank one now, three columns: Name, Email, Enquiry Date)
• About 10 minutes

That’s it. No developer, no API keys, no special software.

Step-by-step: build the agent

Step 1: Create a new scenario in Make.com

Log in to Make.com and click Create a new scenario. You’ll see an empty canvas with a big “+” in the middle. This is where you build your workflow by connecting modules.

Step 2: Set your trigger, the contact form submission

Click the “+” and search for your form tool (Gravity Forms, Typeform, JotForm, etc.). Select the “Watch Submissions” or “New Entry” trigger. Connect it to your account and pick the specific form you want to watch.

Make.com will now listen for new submissions on that form. Every time someone fills it in, the rest of the scenario runs automatically.

Step 3: Add a “Send Email” module

Click the “+” after your trigger, search for Gmail (or Outlook), and choose “Send an Email.” Map the fields: set the “To” field to the submitter’s email address from the form, add a subject line like “Thanks for getting in touch,” and write your follow-up message in the body.

The key here is personalisation. Use the submitter’s first name in the greeting. Make.com lets you drag field values directly into the email body, so “Hi {{First Name}}” is two clicks, not custom code.

Keep the email short: acknowledge their enquiry, set an expectation (“I’ll be back to you personally within one business day”), and sign off with your name and number. Don’t make it sound automated. Make it sound like you.

Step 4: Log the enquiry to Google Sheets

Add another module: Google Sheets, “Add a Row.” Connect it to the spreadsheet you created earlier. Map the Name column to the submitter’s name, the Email column to their email, and the Enquiry Date column to the current timestamp (Make.com has a built-in “now” function for this).

Now every new enquiry writes itself to your spreadsheet automatically. No more digging through your inbox to find who contacted you last week.

Step 5: Set the 24-hour follow-up flag

This is where the agent part kicks in. Add a “Sleep” module set to 24 hours. After the sleep, add a condition: check the spreadsheet to see whether a “Followed Up” column has been marked Yes. If not, send yourself a notification, a Gmail to yourself, a Slack message, or an SMS via Twilio, flagging the lead by name.

When you follow up personally, you open the spreadsheet and mark that row “Yes.” The agent stops chasing you about it.

Step 6: Set your scenario to run automatically

Click the clock icon in Make.com and set the schedule. For a contact form, “immediately” or every 15 minutes is fine. Click Activate. Your agent is live.

How to test it

Before you switch it on for real, run a test. Make.com has a “Run once” button that processes a single trigger without affecting live data. Fill in your own contact form, then hit “Run once.” Watch the modules light up green as each step completes.

Check three things: the confirmation email arrived in your inbox, the row appeared in Google Sheets, and the notification logic worked. If any module shows an error (red X), click it to see exactly which field failed and why. Most issues come from a disconnected account or a field name mismatch, both easy to fix.

Once the test run is clean, activate the scenario. You’re done.

What to do next

This workflow is your foundation. Once it’s running, you’ll see how quickly the pattern transfers to other parts of your business: appointment reminders, quote follow-ups, review request emails. The logic is the same, trigger, action, condition, alert.

The next step is figuring out which agent is the right fit for your specific industry. A tradie needs different automation than a physio or a retail store. In the next post in this series, we break down the most useful agents by industry, so you can skip straight to what works for your kind of business.

If you want to see what other tools connect to Make.com, our agentic AI tools guide for Australia covers the main options. And if you’re newer to business automation generally, start there.

Sources

• MIT Lead Response Management Study (2008), published via InsideSales.com and cited in Harvard Business Review (2011): responding within 5 minutes makes leads 21x more likely to qualify than at 30 minutes.
• LeadAngel Speed-to-Lead Statistics (2025): the first business to respond wins 78% of enquiries.
• Make.com pricing: US$9/month for the Core plan as of June 2026.

This is post 3 in the Agentic AI series, practical guides to AI that works for your business, not just answers your questions. Start with post 1 →

More practical guides: How-To Hub →

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