Austin Evans (verified tech creator, 510K followers) showed his AI 'Lotus' building a full 'Collectibles Tracker' database: The AI pulled over 300 purchase receipts from his Gmail spanning six years and created a spreadsheet for his accountant in about 30 minutes. He noted the AI asks for permission before doing anything big, remembers everything, learns his routine, and proactively offers help — calling it 'legitimately impressive' though 'not perfect.'
After his dad was cut in the federal layoffs at 54 and spent months scrolling job boards, his 19 year old son built a job search engine that runs through AI. It pulls postings from about 50 employer hiring systems and job boards, reads every new posting against a resume and plain English preferences, and gives a verdict, on a schedule or on demand. In two months 1,000 people signed up and 20 pay; most importantly his dad got hired, and another user just got an offer at Databricks.
An agent on WhatsApp stayed with finance course students until they made a first investment. When a person was needed it handed over the talk with the history summed up.
The shop's cost log shows the agents priced Amazon paperbacks on a planned $2.32 print cost when the actual charge was $2.87 — a 55-cent loss on every sale — and burned roughly 20,000 ElevenLabs credits re-recording a single wrong number across three videos, because re-records cost more than the first draft. By day 10 the shop had spent $42.60 with $0 coming in.
$42.6
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
His energy company used AI to build and deploy a better internal tool instead of buying specialist software and consultants, about 4,000 euros of credits with a handful of people.
Hiscox's Chief Underwriting Officer for London Market built an AI Studio 'Tone of Voice' agent that checks documents for on-brand, consistent language. He used it to help prepare two board reports and estimates it saved him six or seven hours, and versions of the agent have since spread to other senior executives and their assistants.
Agency owner Nick Saraev documented handing his business's work to the AI for a week: auditing every task, having the AI plan the automation systems, building evals, and turning the winners into reusable skills. The tasks that scored well were scheduled to run without him; he kept judgement calls for himself.
He edits video for a living. His agents handle the non creative manual work around each project: quality checks for missed text, black frames and logos, subtitles, reformatting for social aspect ratios, spreading files to the right products and pulling source material for descriptions. He logs his hours on every project and says agent assisted projects take about half the time with better quality; the weeks spent building the setup paid for themselves in two weeks.
The AI goes through his sent emails to learn which sorts he typically responds to, pings him when it thinks he left something unanswered he'd want to answer, and repeats the exercise monthly to stay current.