He needed quotes for a seasonal tire swap, with the winter set already on rims, and did not want a day of phone tag. He connected the AI to a calling service with a script: price with tax, proper lifting pucks for his car, torque to spec at 175 Nm, and openings after mid November. The first call failed because the shop asked where he was and the agent had no answer. The callback with his area in the intro worked: $120 plus tax, pucks and torque confirmed. Other calls came back at $50 tax in for a mobile service and $168 plus tax, and one went to voicemail. Every call produced a full transcript. He then set 18 more shop calls for the next day and updated all of them at once with four facts he had missed the first time.
A ham radio operator had a frontier LLM read his pencil sketch of an antenna, build NEC models from it, test and iterate on numerical stability until the approximation held together, and then run a real simulation that answered his questions. He uses the same approach for SPICE circuit simulation.
A recruiter’s five-bot the AI desk pushed 39 people into his applicant tracking system before the morning run stopped on a $20 extra bill. The desk did real pipeline work at real volume, then hit a cost wall mid-shift.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
CData's Dot pulled monthly invoiced totals from Xero for one business unit and QuickBooks Online for the other, checked currencies and invoice statuses matched, and returned one combined table for November 2025 to August 2026. March 2026 was strongest at $28,000 combined; the post notes the test account held demo data.
A client needed a small design job that would have taken him hours. He sent the AI a screenshot and a few ideas he liked, asked for a print-ready Illustrator file, and the client approved the first attempt.
The third case in the same comment: he had the AI call three local companies to get quotes for a fence at his property. Quote gathering for home work normally means three rounds of calls, messages and waiting; his agent made the calls itself. Prices are not stated in the comment.
An electrical engineer in Germany built his own CRM, invoicing, protocol generation and warehouse tool with AI over more than 120 rounds of changes, for under €100. He says the same build would have cost six figures a decade ago, plus €5,000 to €8,000 a year to use, and the tool now runs the way he wants on his own computer.
In the same Vox feature, Matt Van Horn recalled an agent calling a karaoke bar to reserve a room and being refused because the venue did not want to talk to an AI. He completed the reservation through Fo, a service that adds human help.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
He had an idea for an NMR experiment he had been sitting on for years. The AI did the literature review, found reference data, ran spin and spectrum simulations, checked if the idea could work, and compared it with other methods, all while he ate dinner and watched TV.
He asks the AI Agent to caption a video in Palmier Pro the same way as the previous one, and it does it from what it remembers. If there is no voice transcript, it writes code to make the captions happen.