ElevenLabs agent builder is a new frontier for marketers
The one thing you need to know in AI today | AI Ready CMO
OpenAI launched a visual agent builder earlier this week. Now ElevenLabs has one too—except theirs is built specifically for voice workflows. The fact that two major AI platforms announced essentially the same tool within 48 hours of each other tells you everything about where this is headed. Visual workflow builders are becoming infrastructure.
ElevenLabs’ version tackles a problem that’s been quietly killing voice AI adoption: most voice agents can understand what you’re saying but structurally navigate like a 2003 phone tree. They sound human but route like an IVR system. Agent Workflows changes that by letting you design actual branching conversation flows—different Subagents for different phases, each with its own prompt, knowledge base, and tool access. A customer calls about billing? Route them to a Subagent with payment system access and nothing else. They mention a security issue mid-call? Different Subagent, different permissions, different escalation path to humans if needed.
The scoped access model is the part that matters for anyone dealing with compliance or security constraints. Instead of one massive prompt trying to handle everything (and inevitably exposing data where it shouldn’t), you partition capabilities by conversation stage. Your qualification agent doesn’t need pricing data. Your support agent doesn’t need full CRM access. This isn’t just cleaner architecture—it’s how you actually deploy voice AI in regulated industries without your legal team having a breakdown.
The convergence should tell you something: this is the new standard interface for building AI agents. Text-based or voice-based, simple or complex, if you’re deploying agents for customer-facing workflows, you’re going to need this kind of structured approach. The question isn’t whether these tools matter—it’s whether you understand your conversation flows well enough to use them effectively.
Start by mapping one workflow on paper. Customer support routing, lead qualification, appointment booking—pick something repetitive that currently lives across Slack threads and spreadsheets. If you can diagram the decision points and handoffs clearly, you’re ready for these tools. If you can’t, the fancy visual interface won’t help you. The tooling is here. The work is understanding your process well enough to build it.
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