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.