Episode 132: Inside Jotform AI: MCP, Voice Control, and the Future of Building Forms

So we actually have different types of agents as well, not just one agent. These agents can talk to each other. We have a design agent, an agent responsible for building conditional logic, and another responsible for doing calculations within forms. We also have agents for design, emails, thank you pages, and more. They communicate with the product using MCP, so the AI can talk to Jotform using MCP.

Hi, my name is Demetri Panici and I'm a content creator, agency owner, and AI enthusiast. You're listening to the AI Agents Podcast brought to you by Jotform and featuring our CEO and founder Aytekin Tank. This is the show where artificial intelligence meets innovation, productivity, and the tools shaping the future of work. Enjoy the show.

Hello and welcome back to another episode of the AI Agents Podcast. In today's episode, we're talking about Jotform AI, a new release for our product, and we're really excited to show it. So with that being said and without further ado, Idkin, how are you doing?

We just released Jotform AI today and what's really cool about it is that it's basically an AI agent that lives inside Jotform software. We actually feature Notion AI, so it's pretty similar to Notion AI, which is always available on the right bottom side or somewhere else. Jotform AI is very similar; it lives inside Jotform and can help you whenever you have a need.

It can help you in three different ways. First, it can answer your questions if you want to know how to do something. This is just regular support, like AI agents commonly do. Second, it can actually do things for you, like finding an image and putting it on your form or whatever you request. Third, it makes suggestions, such as new questions, designs, and next steps.

During the beta period, we have seen that Jotform AI actually increases the onboarding success rate by about 30%. Jotform has a long history; it's been 20 years since I started it. I hated creating forms manually when I worked for a New York media company with over 100 websites. Editors would always ask me to build forms, and I hated manually setting up the backend, emails, database, reporting—everything.

My goal with Jotform was to make this easy so that anyone, even editors who cannot code, could create their forms themselves. We rewrote Jotform four times from the ground up and made countless improvements over 20 years, but nothing had an impact like this 30% success rate on onboarding. The reason is that we've been developing Jotform AI over the last year, observing beta users' requests and problems, and helping them solve these problems, which is why it became so successful.

Without further ado, I want to show you our page a little bit and then do a live demo using voice. One great thing about Jotform AI is that while using Jotform, you can have this voice agent constantly available to help you while switching pages and doing things on the page.

This is our mascot Pod, which we've had for the last 10 years. The inspiration for Pod came from Mailchimp's Chip, which made their product powerful by having personality. People wouldn't leave Mailchimp even if a better product existed because of Chip. We had Pod for a long time but stopped putting him everywhere, making him hard to find. Recently, as our AI agent started to have personality, we realized it matched perfectly with Pod.

Before I go there, you can create, customize, design, and ask anything. When you need to build forms, it's there to help you create those forms and set up payments or products. If you have hundreds of products, you can give them to Pod. The biggest use case is people giving their Shopify or similar hundreds of products and instantly importing them to Jotform.

Jotform has a huge user base for payments because we don't add any additional percentage fees like Square or Stripe. It's just whatever you pay, and Jotform charges a very low monthly fee. Many people use Jotform to sell their products. It can also handle complex stuff like conditional logic on forms and pretty much everything else.

It can help with design, create QR code links for your forms, create custom emails to send to people who fill out your forms, and obviously it has voice. I'm going to do a voice demo. It can also help with phone settings or anything else you need.

Before the demo, I want to share that we built Jotform AI on top of Jotform AI Agents, which is a customer service product you can use on your website. Over the last year, we improved it with many additional features, allowing it to do things on your web page. We did this because we were also building Jotform AI.

If you have a SaaS product or a web page, you can build your own Jotform AI for your users or customers. All the features we built for Jotform AI were also added to Jotform AI Agents, making it much better. Now, I'm going to do the demo.

Here is the photo. I can type, upload files, import a form URL, or upload a PDF file that turns into a form. But I'm going to use voice.

Hey there. What kind of form can I help you build today? Hey Podo, how are you today?

Hey, I'm doing great. Thanks for asking. So, what form are you thinking about building today?

Are you already sick of me because I've been building so many forms?

Oh, no way. I'm here for all the forms you want to build. Keep them coming. I got you. What's next on your list?

Okay, I want to build a pizza party signup form.

All right, building your pizza party signup form now. Hang tight for a sec.

I'm starting by putting the title at the top of the form, setting up the fields properly, tweaking the wording to make everything clear and easy to understand. All set. Your form's ready to go. Want to tweak or add anything? Just say the word and I'll handle it.

We are still on the form builder interface. I can scroll up and see the form builder, but the form is created. Podo, I have a new request.

Okay, I see that. Let me see what's going on. What's your new request for the pizza party signup form?

I want to spice this form up with Italian vibes, like green colors and stuff.

Italian vibes? I'm not sure I can do that directly. Let me see what's possible.

In terms of design, can you change it to have Italian colors and vibes?

Yeah, I can help with that. Let me adjust the design for you with Italian colors and vibes.

Okay, the form now has green backgrounds. Want a different shade?

No, it looks great. I have another request. For the 'how many people are attending' question, if someone enters two or more, I want you to ask the names of the people attending.

Okay, you want to add a question asking for attendee names if the number entered is two or more. Let me set that up.

The form will now ask for attendee names if two or more people are attending. Want to change anything else?

Can you move that question just below the 'how many people are attending' question?

Yeah, I can move that question for you. One second. The names field is now just below the attendance question.

Can I preview the form now?

Yeah, let me pull up the preview for you. Here's how your form looks to respondents. You can copy the link at the top left to share it.

I don't like the background picture. Can you remove it?

Let me take that background picture off for you. It's gone.

Can you fill out the form for me?

All set. I filled out the form for you. Just review and hit submit when you're ready.

Let me check that for you. Your form is filled out. Just review and hit submit to complete.

I submitted. Can you spice up the thank you page a little bit?

Yeah, I can help spice up your page. Let me see what I can do.

I've made the thank you page look nicer with a warm gradient, shadowed icon, and better fonts. The icon now has a filled background at the top for a balanced look. Want me to tweak it more?

Can you resubmit the form so I can see it?

Yeah, let me resubmit that for you. The form is filled out. Just review and hit submit to complete the test.

Sounds good. This was great, Podo. Thank you very much.

Anytime. Happy to help. Let me know if there's anything else. Bye-bye.

Bye. Have a great day. That was pretty cool. You got to make a form from scratch that way. I'm curious about the approach you took regarding onboarding. You said you asked a bunch of questions about what would make onboarding better. What did people say was needed? What was the hard part? Because that's a big 30% increase. I see the interaction is really easy to just ask for things, but what specifically did you get response-wise that gave you the abilities you have now with Podo and Jotform AI?

We measure success by the number of people signing up at Jotform, creating their first form, and using that form to receive submissions. That's how we measured the 30% increase. The main reason is that no matter how much we tried to create the world's easiest form builder over 20 years, some people still couldn't figure it out. People are busy and don't have time to learn Jotform.

The improvement is that this is like talking to someone and telling them to build a form. You're not learning a user interface or a new product because no matter how good the product is, there's a learning curve. With AI Agents, you can wipe code your form and design it without knowing how to code or looking at code. You don't have to learn Jotform to use it now because we have this interface.

I love voice because many people are disabled, elderly, or have bad eyesight. Voice is powerful because it's natural; we're used to talking and describing what we want. Typing is painful. I've been talking to Podo every day for months because I enjoy using the product over voice. Voice usage is low, less than 10%, mostly text-based, but people upload Google forms, PDFs, or pictures of paper forms and instantly see them turn into Jotform online forms. It's powerful to just describe what you need or give a URL for a similar form.

People also use suggestions a lot, asking for more questions or ideas for their forms. We've seen that people love the AI's suggestions because AI has a knowledge base and sometimes knows their business better than they do. For example, if you're in plumbing, AI has read hundreds or thousands of plumbers talking about their business and has a better perspective than someone with 20 years of experience because it can compare many sources from the internet and training data.

It's hard to explain how powerful AI is and how well it performs, but it's so much fun. I don't think I've ever worked on a product this much before. You're saying about 10% use voice, which is some usage but not as much as you'd hope. What are some other barriers people face when making these forms?

I agree with you about wipe coding. When I was young, I built many websites but abandoned them because I didn't have time to fix problems. When I started wipe coding with Codex and cloud code, I rebuilt those websites by giving old files to AI. I started wipe coding new websites because it's easy: just say what you need, and cloud code works for 20 to 40 minutes and does it for you. You just give feedback and improve it.

When work becomes this easy, turning into describing what you need or giving feedback, you can do much more. Some people need a form immediately and can drop everything to build it, but others want to put a form on their website tomorrow, next week, or next year. Learning a new product and setting things up is too much work, but just going to AI and prompting what you need is instant.

When something becomes easier and faster, people do it more. When something is hard, fewer people do it. Making it as easy as talking lets more people do it. People describe what they want and copy outputs from other AI tools into our AI. They use chat or prompts elsewhere and then copy the output to our AI to preview or create forms. People use ChatGPT and expect products to do the work now.

I expect in a year or two every product will have AI like Notion AI or Jotform AI because it's easier, faster, and more flexible. From a tech standpoint, what changed to allow products to vibe, move components, and vibe code? Is it just large language models being able to mini code at reasonable cost?

It's actually three layers: MCP. We added MCP support for everything on Jotform, which is like an API. Our AI agents can now use MCP to interact with Jotform. We built Jotform AI using Jotform AI Agents, which are different types of agents that talk to each other, like design agents, conditional logic agents, and calculation agents. They talk to the product using MCP, so AI can talk to Jotform using MCP.

We just need to support a feature on MCP for Jotform AI or Podo to do those tasks. Adding MCP support to Jotform AI Agents makes it easy. Any SaaS product can do this. If you have a SaaS product and MCP, you can build your own product AI in about 15 minutes by embedding Jotform AI on your webpage and using MCP to let your AI agent use the product.

It's like using Lego to build stuff. All these features are also available on products like ChatGPT or Claude because you can connect to Jotform's MCP. Instead of using Jotform AI, you can use Jotform through ChatGPT by installing the app and prompting it to build a pizza party signup form, which uses the same MCP protocol API calls.

I was curious how this plays in because products have long been able to build components and move things via API. Now you just chat and it interacts. MCP will change more in the future. How do you think products will integrate in-app versus external MCP interaction? Will people mainly use LLMs like Claude interacting with MCPs or go into products directly?

My guess is app stores like ChatGPT's app store will be as big as mobile app stores like iOS. More people will use products from within AI rather than visiting product websites. It will take a couple of years. AI agents will also use products. For example, if you're wipe coding on cloud code and ask it to build a form, it can use these connections and MCP to create the form. People might not visit the product UI but use it from where they work, with AI agents handling everything.

What do you think is the best product for vibe working to connect with different tools? Codex?

OpenAI is probably better, but I wasn't able to trust it. You built your thing with it?

Yes, I did. I think flagship companies are catching up and maybe surpassing it. Cloud is pretty good.

What about Codex? We didn't chat about it last week.

Codex is better than cloud code, faster, and just gets things done. Even if you're not building websites or software, you can use these products for internal tools or work. You describe what you need, and it installs software or uses existing software to get things done. That's my experience.

I'm not using OpenAI; I tried it but it was too wild for me. I should have bought a Mac Mini like you did. It's still unclear who will be the winner. These things change daily as companies compete and release updates while writing code with AI, which makes them fast.

I agree it's changing fast. We say Claude today, Codex tomorrow, and keep changing. They're all really good, and trying them all is fair and should be done by everyone because preferences change. Going back to Jotform, what are you most looking forward to with people trying this out? How do you think it will change usage? Will there be a spike in forms because it's easier?

Right now, we're focused on answering questions. 80% of our support is handled by Jotform AI, which took over most of the support team. Our support team now does live chats and final answers with faster response times, down to 15 minutes from one and a half hours. That's the first success with Jotform AI Agents.

The second is that Jotform AI doesn't just answer questions; it does things for you by handling the product. We'll continue improving it. Next, we want Podo to help with more suggestions when users are stuck or rage clicking. Podo should figure out why users are unhappy or stuck and be more proactive instead of just answering questions.

Our goal is to make onboarding so easy that people have fun creating more forms. We'll release more pieces of Jotform AI still in beta over the coming months. I prefer to keep surprises but appreciate teasing it.

Is there anything else you want to say? We've covered pretty much everything about the update.

This is the future: instead of learning stuff, you get help from AI. Some worry about not learning, but why learn Jotform if you can use it without learning by talking to AI? Early wins make people invest more in the product. When people succeed using Jotform, they use and learn it more.

When Podo changes things, it shows you the new versions and what is changing, like submitting the form or thank you page. So you're learning the product while getting success. I think it's great and amazing. We'll have more fun discovering ideas and announce them on this podcast in coming months.

With that said, everyone make sure to check out Jotform AI. It's going to blow your mind, change how you work with forms, and make you love Jotform more if you've already used it or love it for the first time if you haven't. Thank you so much for watching, and we'll see you in the next one. Bye. See you next time.