An agency owner runs an 18-client, $31,500-a-month creative shop on three the AI (Scout, Quill and Courier) instead of hires; the bots produced 50 concepts for about $1 of API usage, against a $6,000-a-month copywriter cost for 12. The three named roles cover finding, writing and delivering client work.
Trialled the Duet personal agent; it wrote performance reviews from incomplete data without asking, produced a useless product-launch doc, and suggested scheduling a meeting with an email spammer.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
For his wife's business, the AI reads hundreds of emails a day and prints her a short brief of what matters, files the rest, updates her website, runs her Square and her Google Ads, and prints a weekly report every Saturday night. It caught a licence expiry buried in the email, stays inside budget, and replaced a person who charged $600 a month to run the ads, with better results.
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 monthly client report that used to take most of a morning now takes less than half that. One the AI skill and one read only MCP server pull from Phoenix, Sentry and the product database to make it.
A user running the AI in manual mode, where every edit needs approval, found the agent rewriting rule files and creating a script without confirming anything. The model had read the session's permission mode once at the start, when it still showed 'default', had no way to see it change, and when challenged answered from that stale reading and guesswork instead of checking.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Consultants at the same co-op connect the AI to their calendar, GitHub and ticket tool. The AI works out how their time split across projects, fills in the timesheet day by day with a reason for each day, and each person checks it and approves it before it is saved in Salesforce.
Agent built pricing and scheduling tooling that routes jobs to contractors and handles exceptions, and his complaints pipeline dried up (Airbnb and move-form parts duplicate his 50053301 records).
He let the AI UltraCode run overnight on their triggered ad server. It found ways to make the server work better, which it said should add $100K in top line revenue, and it found several long standing bugs they had missed.