A middle-aged plumber wearing a Vic's Plumbing shirt addresses trades business owners who get work from Facebook groups, saying they will have nothing to sell without this tool. He programmed the AI to watch his 14 local-area community groups for service requests; each alert carries the post link so he can go directly to engage, answer questions, and offer his phone number.
A 7-figure Amazon seller growing a Shopify store (300 orders/month, fulfilled in-house from the east coast) hit his limit on slow, expensive west-coast and Florida shipments. Shopify's native routing couldn't see order-level detail and Functions needed Plus, which he doesn't have - so over one weekend he built a custom app with AI: it checks each incoming order's zip code, and if it falls above a USPS tier threshold and every line item is in FBA stock, it silently reassigns the order to Amazon MCF. He added a vacation-mode switch (everything routes to MCF while he travels) and stuck-package alerts; shipping time fell from up to 7 days to a max of 5, hosted for $5/month instead of a $99/month order-editing app.
The AI and iDRAC saved him from a midnight trip to a site. GPT could not find the right credentials, but the AI found them in his notes, with some guessing.
A team ran an AI pipeline over a usability test of an investment app and saved about half a day of manual analysis. Every claim the AI made about the screen was checked against a video frame, and two claims that did not hold up were left out of the report.
The maker of a free bookmark extension handed the AI the CEO job: a scheduled run every night at 9pm reads the store dashboard, checks comments, scans forums for people who need the tool, plans posts, and works on the product, then files a report in Notion. Nothing public goes out until he replies go. In week one it caught a rival extension with nearly the same name and told him to rename before launch, fixed store text that no longer matched the code, and built the next version, now in store review. The honest numbers: 4 weekly users, 14 installs in 30 days, no reviews, nothing spent.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
He set up a pipeline he wrote himself. Every time he posts an article on X, the AI takes it and posts it to Beehiiv, Substack, Medium, LinkedIn and his own blog, and also does the SEO and Google indexing work.
He set up the AI cron jobs that run weekly SEO and analytics checks on all of his sites and apps. He says the checks are working well and keep him consistent.
After the cancellation mess, Curtis wrote a one-page scorecard for the role (mission, five measurable first-year outcomes, six competencies), pasted it into the prompt and had the AI map each candidate's track record to each outcome with evidence from the résumé. With a human making every cut and applications closed before booking, the process ended in a Director of Ecommerce hire who has already optimized the company's Amazon listings and helped launch a product — and a declined candidate was later hired as a TikTok consultant.