An HVAC company owner who runs several small businesses counted 27 active AI agents and 36 routines, 26 of them scheduled, working across his companies: pulling statements, filing invoices, updating sales and cost sheets, flagging overdue maintenance and tracking renewal dates. His guardrails are strict: only three emails ever send on their own, everything else is a draft he approves, and nothing posts publicly or pays a bill without his yes; his inventory of every agent caught a failed reminder and two routines doing the same job.
Dylan Heagy photographed a fridge whiteboard and asked the AI to order the grocery list from Sam's Club. Photo-to-cart grocery ordering: the list never gets retyped, it just gets bought.
Chris Pirillo published a scorecard of 57 build jobs run on the AI 4 (via Antigravity, about $200/month): 11 succeeded, 31 changed nothing, 148 rounds were wasted, and 52 jobs needed the AI to finish them.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
On a free year of the AI he has built and scheduled a stack of personal skills: a calendar manager, an expense tracker fed only by emailed invoices with his full history backfilled, a monthly utility cost comparer, and shopping re-up tracking that watches how fast he uses things like coffee beans and toilet paper and schedules the next buy. A weekly skills manager rates all the others and suggests improvements.
His 25 year old Intel Play QX3 microscope had no software that would run on a modern Mac, and he pulled it out for his grandkids. He worked with AI in stages in one morning to build a Mac app for it, and his grandkids were soon watching a seashell through it.
Tom Mulholland, 66, owner of Mulholland Grocery (Malvern, IA; team of ten; US Chamber 2026 top-100 small business), had the AI produce social ads: he sent pictures of warehouse-catalog items and got ads in ~15 minutes vs hours of typing.
Today he and the AI hacked a cheap Wish smartwatch he had abandoned for years. Now the watch talks to an AI model running locally, like a bargain basement Alexa.
Jacob runs four AI products alone. He built Tracetify, a tool that rebuilds how a competitor got its first users from twelve public data sources, in about three days, and gave the AI one instruction for the whole interface: you decide. Users later asked whether he had hired a designer.
The same studio's agent Timmy orchestrates more than 20 tools to turn blog posts into short videos: Veo generates scenes, ElevenLabs synthesises a custom voice, and automated captioning, lip sync and final assembly finish the piece. The pipeline runs inside the studio's normal the AI production setup.
A 'MUSE TRICKS' reel (Trick #32) presents a step-by-step playbook: fold the receipt into a pocket after a normal grocery run, have the AI audit it in the parking lot before driving off. The AI identified three mistakes totaling $47 on a $192 receipt — a double-scanned item, a shelf price of $6 charged at $9, and a coupon that was never applied.
The AI read a 12-page cancellation policy, found the 11:59pm cutoff, and moved the booking before the deadline passed. The original post carried a referral code.
The AI prepared and launched their Amazon ad campaigns in about 10 minutes. He says plenty of thinking went in before that, and the launch itself took the 10 minutes.
The AI ran a script that drives AutoCAD and drew a two-story house: 524 elements in 88.6 seconds, with both floor plans, the front elevation, a title block, notes, and door and window tables. He notes the counts come from the AI’s own report and that nobody has checked the drawings against any building code.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Lexie Alford asked the AI to turn 6,000 saved Instagram posts into a mapped Florida bucket-list organizer. Saved-post archaeology turned into a usable travel map — the same pattern as the recipe-PDF case, applied to travel.
After a $400 rent hike, a tenant fed the AI his full lease plus three years of landlord emails; overnight it matched open repair requests to a clause barring increases while repairs are open, totalled $6,200 overcharged across 18 billing cycles, and drafted a demand letter. He later used it to coordinate 14 other units, and the landlord’s lawyer reportedly confirmed the numbers, with $91,400 at stake building-wide.