You can do anything with AI agents: search for information in your library of documents, build code, scrape the web, get insight and trenchant analysis of complex data, and much more. You can even create a virtual office with a bunch of agents specialized in different tasks and have them work hand-in-hand like your own staff of specialized digital employees.

So how hard is this to do? If a regular person wanted to build their own AI financial advisor, for instance, which platform would serve them best? No API, no weird coding, no Github—we just wanted to see how well the best AI companies are at creating AI agents without the user possessing a high degree of technical skill.

Of course, you get what you pay for. In this case, we also wanted to see if there was a correlation between how easy it was for a layman to set up an agent, and the quality of results each delivered.

Our experiment pitted five heavyweights against each other: ChatGPT, Claude, Huggingface, Mistral AI, and Gemini. Each platform got the same basic instructions to create a financial advisor.

The test focused exclusively on out-of-the-box capabilities. Whether the agents were capable of handling a common scenario—in this case, helping someone balance $25,000 in investments against $30,000 in debt. We also wanted to see how good they were at analyzing a trading chart. We avoided using additional tools that would increase the agents’ productivity and instead tried to take the most simple approach.

TL;DR Here’s what we found out and how we ranked the...