Emergent vs. Relevance AI: The Builder vs. The Expert

Welcome to our digital workforce battle, Emergent vs. Relevance AI. This comparison is a little more complicated than the last one, which was between a raw super-brain and a software engineer. It’s a fight between two different ways to get things done: making a machine from scratch or hiring a highly trained expert who has their own tools.

Emergent is in one corner. They think the best digital employee is a piece of custom software that you own, control, and use. Relevance AI lets you put together “teams” of agents that are experts at certain business tasks, like sales, research, and customer assistance.

If you think about it, it’s kind of like picking between a factory and hiring a contractor if you’re a business owner trying to decide which one to use. Both will get you the item, but the way you get there is very different. Let’s get rid of all the marketing fluff and see what it’s really like to use these two platforms.

The Idea: App vs. Agent

The main difference between Emergent vs. Relevance AI is how they see the world.

Emergent sees a digital employee as an app. Using Emergent is like being a product manager. You tell Emergent what the problem is, like “to keep tabs on my competitors,” and they write the code to do it. It makes a database to hold the data about your competitors, a backend to scrape their websites, and a frontend dashboard where you can see the results. You get a real asset: a working web app that is yours.

Relevance AI sees a digital employee as a part of a workflow. It doesn’t try to make you a new piece of software; instead, it gives you a blank slate to work with to build a “chain” of logic. You drag and drop steps: “Step 1: Google to look for it. Step 2: GPT-4 to make a summary. Step 3: Save it to a spreadsheet. It feels less like writing code for an app and more like teaching a skilled worker how to do something. You aren’t making a new dashboard; you’re making a worker who lives in the Relevance ecosystem and does things for you.

The Emergent vs. Relevance AI Hiring Process

Let’s use a real-life example: You want an artificial intelligence system to manage your sales calls. You want it to look for leads on LinkedIn, get their email addresses, and have a personalized message sent to them afterwards.

You will enjoy Relevance AI. This is exactly what Relevance AI was made to do. When you log in, you probably see a template for a “BDR Agent” (Business Development Representative). You link it to your LinkedIn account and maybe a tool for adding more data, like Apollo or Clearbit. You change the prompt that tells it what to say in emails.

In less than an hour, you can have a digital worker who is going through lists and forwarding emails. It seems like you just hired a freelancer who is good at what they do but needs your login information. The interface is made for this. You can see logs of what the agent “thought” and “did.” It’s very specialized for operations teams that want to automate a process without having to worry about servers.

If you ask Emergent to do this, you will get something else. You write, “Make me a bot that will help me reach out to sales.” It needs to get a CSV file of names, scrape their LinkedIn profiles, make an email, and save it to a database for me to look over.

Emergent will do more than just give you a workflow; it will also make you a “Sales Outreach Portal.” You’ll see a screen where you can log in. You will see a dashboard with graphs that show how many emails were sent. There will be a button that says “Send and Approve.” You are making a custom CRM from the ground up that fits your way of selling. It takes a little more “architecting” in your head to describe the whole system, but the end result is software amalgamated with your business perfectly instead of a workflow that you have to fit into.

The Skills of Emergent vs. Relevance AI

This is where Relevance AI’s “Specialist” quality really stands out. Relevance comes with “skills” already built in. The agents can use these integrations that have already been made. They know how to use Google, crawl a site, then read a PDF. You don’t have to tell them how to do it; you just add that skill to their work process. It’s like giving a video game character a sword and shield. You give them the “Internet Search” sword and the “PDF Reading” shield, and they’re ready to go.

On the other hand, Emergent has to write the skill. Your Emergent app has to conjure code to call a search API if you want it to search Google. 

Here’s the twist: Emergent can do anything because it writes code. Relevance AI would probably say, “Sorry, I don’t have a skill for that,” if you have a strange, old legacy system from 1995 that only accepts data in a certain, hard-to-find file format. Emergent will say, “No problem,” and write a script just for that strange format. Relevance AI has a lot of standard tools, but Emergent can make any tool that can be coded.

The Emergent vs. Relevance AI Manager Experience

Once these digital workers are up and running, how do you keep them in line?

It feels like managing a team when you have to deal with a Relevance AI agent. You can see all of your agents on a dashboard. These are the search agent, sales agent, and “support agent.” You can see them run in real time. You can see when they don’t work and start them over. It is a center for controlling operations. It’s great for someone who wants to manage a group of automated workers.

It feels like managing a product when you have to manage an Emergent employee. You are not watching a “worker” run; you are logging into an app. You can see what it did by going to the “History” tab in the app it made for you. You don’t “retrain” the agent, you tell Emergent to “fix the bug.” It’s a small change, but it revolutionizes how you feel about the work. You stop being in charge of people and start being in charge of systems.

The Verdict: Emergent vs. Relevance AI?

So, which one should you use in your business?

If you are an operations manager, a sales leader, or a founder who wants to automate a workflow right now, choose Relevance AI. Relevance AI is the expert you need if your problem is “I spend four hours a day copying data from A to B and writing emails.” It’s more about automating than making software. It’s strong, it’s visual, and it’s made for the “no-code” operator who wants to get things done without having to worry about databases.

Pick Emergent if you are a creator, entrepreneur, or visionary who wants to make a platform. Emergent is the builder for you if you ever say things like, “I wish there was an app that did X,” or “I want to make a tool that everyone on my team can log into.” It lets you make assets that are strong, stand-alone, and totally unique. You’re not just automating a task; you’re designing a solution.

In the end, Relevance AI gives you a fish and cleans and cooks it for you. Emergent makes you a high-tech, automated fishing boat.