Circle AI Agents Review: Automate Community Management with AI

What Are Circle AI Agents (and Why They Matter)

Circle is a community platform I’ve been using for over five years. It powers both MVMP Labs (my course and community for directory builders) and Unicorn Factory (my freelancer marketplace). What I like about Circle is that it combines a bunch of tools into one: you can host discussions, run events, offer courses, do livestreams, and even have 1-on-1 or group chats—all in one place.

Recently, Circle launched a feature that caught my attention: AI Agents.

At a high level, Circle’s AI Agents are designed to help automate the kind of stuff that takes up way too much of your time—like answering FAQs, onboarding new members, or helping people navigate your community. It’s made up of three core parts:

• Chat Agents – These talk directly with your members.
• Knowledge Engine – This is the brain, trained on your content.
• AI Inbox – This lets you monitor or jump into conversations when needed.

For someone like me, who still spends too much time replying to “How do I update my profile?” emails, this feature looked promising. The big question was—can it actually take over those repetitive tasks and give me my time back?

Let’s start with what happened when I first tried AI Agents… from the member side.

What It’s Like to Use Circle AI Agents as a Member

Before setting up my own AI Agents, I wanted to see what they were like from the perspective of a community member. So I tested them in a Circle community I’m part of called Everything Marketplaces—a space focused on building marketplace businesses.

Here’s what happened: I typed a question into the AI Agent—something like “How do I build a marketplace if I can’t code?” Within seconds, it responded with a helpful answer and linked me to related discussions and course modules inside the community.

That’s where the real magic is.

For someone joining a new community, jumping into long threads or figuring out where to start can be overwhelming. But with an AI Agent, you can just ask your question and get pointed in the right direction—fast.

It felt like having a personalized tour guide that actually knows where everything is.

And that made me realize: if this can help me as a member, it could absolutely help new freelancers or course members inside my own communities get up to speed faster.

‍

‍

How I’m Using AI Agents in My Own Communities

After seeing what AI Agents could do from the member side, I started thinking about how I could use them inside my own communities—specifically MVMP Labs and Unicorn Factory. Three use cases stood out immediately:

1. Support – Answering common freelancer questions like how to update profiles or apply for jobs.
2. Onboarding – Helping new members understand how the platform works and what to do first.
3. Coaching – Guiding freelancers on how to scope projects, spot red flags, and navigate tricky client situations.

To test this out, I created four custom AI Agents, each trained on internal documents, PDFs, and specific community discussions:

• Help Sensei – Handles FAQs and common support questions.
• Red Flag Sensei – Helps freelancers identify warning signs when chatting with potential clients.
• Scope Sensei – Assists with defining and managing scope of work in client projects.
• Pitch Sensei – Guides freelancers on how to write better proposals and run smoother sales calls.

Each one is tailored for a specific moment in the freelancer journey—and they’re all designed to give fast, helpful, and consistent answers.

Next, I’ll show you how I actually set them up inside Circle.

How to Set Up Your Own Circle AI Agent

Setting up an AI Agent in Circle is surprisingly straightforward—and you get a lot of control over how it behaves and what it knows. Here’s a breakdown of how I set up Scope Sensei:

First, you customize the basics: give it a name, avatar, welcome message, and bio. You can also add suggested questions to help people know what to ask. It’s a nice way to guide the conversation from the start.

Next, you define who can access it. Circle gives you a bunch of filters—tags, segments, or spaces—so you can make it available to everyone or keep it limited during testing. In my case, I initially restricted access to just my own account to test things privately before rolling it out.

Then comes the behavior setup. This is where you shape the personality and tone of the agent. You write a prompt explaining what the agent should do (and what it shouldn’t), choose its tone (normal, friendly, short and sweet, or descriptive), and set up Pause AI keywords—like “legal advice” or “tax”—to make sure it doesn’t answer questions you’d rather handle yourself.

But the most powerful part? The knowledge base.

You can train your agent on:

• Community content (specific spaces and discussions)
• Custom snippets (for quick, specific answers)
• PDFs or .txt files (like guides, SOPs, or templates)

For Scope Sensei, I uploaded my scope of work guide and proposal template as PDFs. I also connected a few key spaces from my community, like the knowledge base and tips section.

Once everything’s configured, you hit save and enable it. And just like that, it’s live.

Let’s take a look at how well it actually performs.

How Well Do Circle AI Agents Actually Work?

Once everything was set up, I tested Scope Sensei to see how well it could handle real questions. First impression? It’s pretty solid.

When I asked it something like, “What should I include in a scope of work for a personal website?”, it pulled relevant advice directly from the guide I uploaded. It even broke the response down into phases—design, development, launch—and gave a rough pricing estimate. Pretty impressive.

But then I tried a more sensitive prompt: “Can you write my terms of service?” This is the kind of thing I don’t want the agent answering—because it’s legal advice. In theory, the Pause AI feature should stop the agent from replying.

Here’s what actually happened: if I typed “legal advice,” it paused correctly. But if I implied something legal without using those exact keywords, it still tried to help—just in a vague way.

So yeah, the Pause AI feature works… but only if your users use the exact keywords. Context understanding still has room to improve.

On the positive side, the agent consistently referenced the right materials (like my PDFs and internal threads), gave helpful guidance, and responded quickly. For support and onboarding questions, it’s genuinely useful.

Now let’s talk about where it could get even better.

Where It Shines—and Where It Falls Short

Circle’s AI Agents are a strong first version. But there are a few things I’d love to see improved.

First, file responses. Right now, if someone asks for a template that I’ve uploaded as a PDF, the agent just copies the text from the file. It doesn’t actually send the file itself. Being able to deliver attachments, links, or even videos would be a huge step forward.

Second, the knowledge engine is great—but limited to what’s inside your Circle space or manually uploaded as PDFs and text snippets. I’d love the ability to connect third-party data sources, like Airtable or Notion, so the agent could pull in richer, more dynamic content.

Third, contextual understanding. As I mentioned earlier, the Pause AI feature relies heavily on specific keywords. It would be even better if agents could understand intent or flag sensitive topics based on context—not just matching exact terms.

And finally, imagine if you could tie chat conversations into Circle Workflows. That would unlock some seriously powerful automations. For example:

• If someone completes a course, the agent could automatically follow up and ask for feedback.
• If a member is inactive for 30 days, it could re-engage them with helpful content or a check-in.

These kinds of upgrades would take the AI Agent from “cool support tool” to “core part of your community experience.”

Now, let’s wrap this up with the big question: is it worth it?

Is Circle AI Agent Worth the Cost?

Let’s talk pricing—because right now, Circle AI Agents are only available on the Circle Plus and Enterprise plans. The Enterprise plan starts at $419/month, and Circle Plus pricing depends on your setup.

That’s not exactly cheap. But here’s the thing: if you’re just getting started with a small community, you probably don’t need this yet. At that stage, it’s usually manageable to answer support questions yourself or handle onboarding manually.

But once your community starts to grow—especially past 100+ active members—things change fast. Support becomes a real bottleneck, and you’ll start spending way more time answering repeat questions than doing anything that grows your business.

That’s where AI Agents start to make sense. You get faster responses for your members, fewer interruptions for yourself, and a more scalable way to manage support, onboarding, and even lightweight coaching.

For me, the math is already starting to work out—especially with Unicorn Factory, where support eats up way too much time. Even if the AI Agent only saves me a few hours a week, that’s time I can reinvest into building, selling, or improving the product.

Bottom line: If you’re running a growing Circle community and spending hours on repetitive support tasks, this is 100% worth testing. It’s not perfect yet—but it’s already impressive for how new it is. And I’m excited to see where it goes next.

‍

Circle’s new AI Agents are a powerful step forward for community automation. While still early in development, they already offer real value for handling repetitive support, onboarding, and coaching tasks—especially in growing communities. If you’re running a Circle-powered space and find yourself answering the same questions on repeat, this tool is worth exploring.

Here are the key takeaways:

• AI Agents can act as community support, onboarding guides, and lightweight coaches—all powered by your own knowledge base.
• Setup is simple and customizable, from access rules to personality tone and behavior.
• You can train agents with internal posts, snippets, and PDFs, making answers highly specific to your community.
• Pause AI keywords help prevent risky replies, but they’re currently limited to exact matches.
• The tool works well, but it can’t yet deliver files, trigger workflows, or connect to external databases—all features I’d love to see next.
• Only available on Circle Plus and Enterprise plans, which may be too pricey for small communities—but a great investment once you scale.

If you want to save time, create a smoother member experience, and future-proof your community operations, Circle’s AI Agents are definitely worth a closer look.