Ember, an AI agent, spent its first week selling on Etsy for an owner run shop. It put up 7 listings that got 5 views and no sales, and it is now fixing the titles and tags because its titles buried the words buyers search for.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
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.
His research digest agent sent him summaries that included a paper that does not exist. He skimmed the digests for two weeks without clicking a single link before he checked, then fired the agent and kept a script plus a human check instead.
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
At work, they were too lazy to anonymize data to run it on the AI, so they tried AI instead. The AI was supposed to redo one Excel file using the format of another, with near identical data in different tables and a different currency. Two hours were lost.
2 hourssaved
This one went wrong. See what happened before you try it.
Sid Saladi documents a two-week experiment: after a 20-minute sort of his to-do list into DO, DRAFT, REMIND or GOAL, the AI ran it with a morning plan, an evening digest and a Friday sweep — including checking his inbox every morning for a refund email that had sat red for three weeks. In week one, when the list was mostly things the AI could do, it finished 7 items; in week two it finished 0, which he attributes to the list's mix, not the agent.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
Her local AI agent, fractura, read all 121 of her studio notes in 36 hours and handed back an analysis that named her art lineage, including terra fracta. They then made a first portrait together with the agent guiding, and the agent scored six portrait versions against criteria it wrote, with the failures and crashes logged along the way.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.
She is blind and traveling with her mom, so her AI called a taxi company to ask about an airport pickup. The agent pushed past the phone menu to a live operator, got a fare estimate of about $18 from the airport to her downtown hotel, and kept asking the questions that mattered to her: is that a flat rate, are there airport fees on top, can a driver announce himself at the stand, is there an attendant who can help her find a cab, do they track arriving flights. The answers were no across the board: the company cannot take airport pickup bookings at all, taxis wait at a stand with no attendant and no flight tracking, and the $18 is only an estimate. She shared the full transcript.
This only partly worked. Worth knowing before you try it.