Airia AI Tutorial for Beginners – Build Your First AI Agent

About this video

Presenter David, partnering with Airia, builds a meeting prep AI agent and contrasts Airia with tools like n8n and Zapier: building agents, he argues, is also about choosing the right model, reducing hallucinations, managing cost and performance, and security and governance from the start. The video offers a 14-day free trial that includes $10 free to spend on any AI model. In Airia Studio he creates an agent in the default project (projects are containers for agents and reusable components, with an optional budget for LLM calls), names it ‘meeting prep agent’, and adds a system prompt — shared via a link in the description — that asks for a meeting dossier with meeting info, background on the person, purpose, relationship and communication history, discussion points and questions. He recommends picking a cheap model while testing, noting models are preconfigured with API keys in Airia, and explains temperature (lower = more predictable) and injecting date/time context so the agent knows what ’tomorrow’ means. He then adds MCP servers as toolkits: Microsoft Graph MCP for Outlook, credentialed ahead of time with only view-calendars and read-email permissions and scoped to the project, and Brave Search using Airia’s universal key. A key tip is to turn off every tool the agent does not need, because unused tools consume context and cost money, leaving only email search/read, list/get calendar events, and web search. Testing ‘Help me prep for my meeting tomorrow’ in the playground shows the tool calls and produces the dossier. He then adds an email inbox interface (restricted to his own domain), publishes the agent, and gets the dossier back by email. He closes with four extras: a compare playground (comparing versions on output, token usage, price, time and execution logs), richer workflow steps, custom behaviours such as voice and looping over a CSV, and a community library of agents to build on.

Key takeaways

• Airia is positioned against n8n/Zapier-style builders on model choice, hallucination reduction, cost/performance control, and built-in security and governance
• Build cheap while testing: pick a low-cost preconfigured model, set a project budget for LLM calls, and only move up once the agent works
• Give agents tools via MCP servers with least-privilege credentials — here Microsoft Graph for Outlook with only calendar-view and email-read permissions, plus Brave Search
• Disable every tool the agent does not need: unused enabled tools still consume context and add cost on each run
• Agents can be exposed beyond the default API — including an email inbox interface, chat widget, schedule, webhook listener, or Slack/Teams bot — after publishing

Episode details: published January 16, 2026 · 15:22 long. Summary written by Self Growth Videos from the episode itself. Business results and any income figures mentioned are Kevin Stratvert’s own claims, shared for education — they are not typical or guaranteed.

← Previous: Best WordPress Plugins 2026 | 11 Must-Have Plugins for Every Site · Next: Mailchimp Tutorial for Beginners – Learn Email Marketing in 2026 →

All Kevin Stratvert videos · Kevin Stratvert profile · Kevin Stratvert on YouTube