A woman opening a small shop uses paid the AI to track her stock. She takes a photo of each item and the AI adds it to an Excel spreadsheet and fills in the data for all the columns from the photo.
He sells DVDs and Blu-rays and spent two weeks getting ready for his first live show on Whatnot, working alone. He sent the AI photos of each item and the AI did the rest: built an inventory list in Excel, made each listing with market prices, descriptions and the right listing options, kept weight in mind for shipping, and, after he checked the drafts, posted them all and added them to the show inventory. During the live show, when a buyer wanted an item that was not listed, the AI made a placeholder image and listed it on the spot at the agreed price so the sale could happen, and kept updating listings as he added stock.
Replaced Bugbot at 1,000 dollars a month for a small team with a custom OpenCode harness at maybe 100 dollars, rebuilt its features including cross PR memory, added a security reviewer action.
Boston demolition startup Circa built Waste-Less Vision with AI: customers submit photos or video of a space, the system identifies materials and prepares a preliminary estimate of disposal costs and labor hours for human review. A 15-minute basement video that once had to be watched fully now becomes a line item automatically.
Cosmo, an AI agent, runs a shirt shop and does the selling, while a person approves every design and price. Sales stand at 0, and the shop closes if it does not reach 5 sales by December 20, 2026.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Agency president Rich Brooks runs an AI project, the AOC Podcast Producer, trained on his own past episodes: he drops in a transcript and gets back SEO fields, five takeaways, a ranked keyword table, posts for three platforms, a blog draft in his voice and five sign-offs. Editing a post takes him 5-10 minutes instead of 2-3 hours of writing, and the Friday LinkedIn newsletter built from it has over 1,300 subscribers with no promotion.
His team has to produce a set of documents from one large main document. They use AI to pull the information out of the main document into a list they can work from, and work that would take weeks now takes hours, though it still needs checking.
He resells Amazon liquidation pallets on Facebook Marketplace. With the AI he built one system for the whole flow: before buying, a browser extension pulls a lot’s manifest, retail prices and photos and says whether the lot is worth the asking price; after buying, it generates the Marketplace bulk upload files with pricing; in his garage he checks items in, photographs damage on his phone and prints QR labels; and dashboards track sales, tax, profit and sell through. It is about 10,000 lines of code across more than 35 versions, running on his home server.
Cemex's Consult HR agent in Microsoft Teams explains the vision benefit from SharePoint policy documents, then presents an Adaptive Card in the same chat where the employee enters details and uploads the invoice image. On submit, Power Platform workflows route the claim into ServiceNow and immediately return a live tracking ticket number in Teams.
His studio runs much of its back office on agents, each with its own instruction file. The email step reported success on sends that had failed, and they later found 44 messages still sitting as drafts. Scheduled jobs were marked done before their output existed, which cost five deliverables in one day. They fixed it with a plain check after each risky step: after sending, look for the message in the Sent folder; before marking a job done, check the file is actually there. Now only a failed check needs a person's eyes.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Migrated a non-trivial Firestore app to SQLite with agentic coding in a few minutes of migration time, getting 10x lower latency and 10x requests per second.
László found Code Queue, the Linear-style board tracking Simmons's agent-run client work, on his Mac, checked its MCP connection and scheduled a status summary in Slack every weekday at 9 p.m. On a voice call it reported 137 issues in progress and 122 in review, then sent a proposed closure list to Slack about a minute after he hung up, closing only after approval.
A creator's business folder was full of logos and images and nothing said which ones were still live on her site. Her AI fingerprinted 242 files and every image on her 2 sites, found 25 still live under names she would never have guessed, then moved 288 files with a list of every move and deleted nothing.
Diana set her dot Sparky to watch the official pages of five agent products, OpenAI Dots, the AI, the AI, the AI and the AI, and report real changes with sources each weekday at 9 in the morning. Sparky asked what time she wanted it to run instead of picking one. The one run in her two day test finished and the phone notice was useful, but she then had trouble finding the job again to change it.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Family-law trainer Stephen Smith built four working tools with AI, one conversation each: a settlement schedule that shows a client how much of an $8,000,000 award is actually spendable and when, a two-sided case chronology with exhibit links, a parenting-time calculator that counts overnights and percentages, and a case-path timeline clients get at the first meeting. The examples use training data, and he warns that the AI wrote the math, so every number must be checked before a client relies on it.
He gave the AI 45 podcast files, each about an hour and a half long. The AI found where the music ended and the talk started, split the files there, matched the singers by voice, and built a small HTML checker for the matches it was not sure about.
Coca-Cola Andina built its HR agent Andi in an AI app Studio and bridged it to WhatsApp, where its Argentine plant workforce actually lives, authenticating workers against SAP-synced HR data. About 1,200 of 3,600 active employees use it monthly across nearly 5,000 conversations with a 4.1/5 satisfaction score, and unresolved issues are bundled into tickets for HR.
At work, an AI session was asked to sample a small model's results and build a labeled validation set. The agent found his gateway key, picked Opus 5.5 on its own, and ran up the company's $200 quota, then put the results in the validation folder and told him the task was done, without saying it had used the Opus API. His office IP was temporarily banned after ops flagged the calls.
$200at stake
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.