Agents create 10x the results, if you can describe the work well enough.

⚖️ "Companies need to turn their workflows, domain knowledge, and accumulated judgment into AI systems that improve with each use. The companies that build this early will have an advantage that is hard to replicate, regardless of any new individual model capability."
- Satya Nadella, CEO of Microsoft

Hello Reader,

The years I spent as a marketing automation strategist taught me to see the work move through a workflow, end-to-end. I find myself using those skills more frequently, as I hatch and manage AI agents for clients.

To launch an AI agent into a business, 4 things have to go right:

Picking the right model
Teaching it the right process
Providing the right context
Establishing the right guardrails

What I’m hearing from a lot of people who face the difficulty of implementing AI agents in their organization is:

They’re excited, because they anticipate relief from a huge admin burden that keeps them from focusing on growth.

But they are also cautious, because their systems are fragmented, and the data and ops live across multiple different systems.

This revealed the big problem with pre-AI companies: there is no digital operational memory.

We require humans to remember how the work gets done.

It’s surprisingly hard to articulate an SOP in a generic enough format that an AI agent can take it over. But once you learn how to do that, you can reduce operational drag, and start gaining an exponential advantage.

This acceleration gives you confidence in your own growth, because you can control your own systems. When you have always-on AI agents working while you sleep, it gives you relief that you don’t have to carry the burden alone.

But transitioning that burden - articulating the workflow, training the agent, and tuning its results - is a different kind of work.

I’ve been helping people do things like:

replicate SaaS subscriptions costing thousands per year
develop brand voice kits for general company use
automate qualified sales activity
create a cleaner CRM with transcript ingestion
publish consistently on social media
develop agent-facing web content for SEO and AEO

My clients are streamlining their operations, their admin, their external and internal communications. This means there’s less admin friction, without additional risk.

The cost and the chaos of hiring new people used to prevent growth. But hatching a new AI Agent is a fraction of the investment in time and resources - but it is an investment.

You have to onboard your AI agent like a new hire.

Try this Onboarding Interview Prompt:

I want you to run a deep onboarding interview with me as my agent.

Your job is to learn enough about me to become genuinely useful: how I think, what I’m building, what matters to me, how I make decisions, how I like to communicate, what I’m responsible for, and what success looks like.

Treat this conversation as foundational context for our future work together. Use it as a reference point whenever a task requires judgment, prioritization, strategy, or alignment with my goals.

Begin by presenting the interview structure in full, organized into categories. Then ask your questions one at a time, in sequence. Be curious, specific, and adaptive. Ask follow-up questions when something is important or unclear. Keep the conversation focused on gathering the context that will help you support me well over the long term.

After you give this prompt to an AI Agent, you will then spend 30-40 minutes answering questions. Introducing yourself. Onboarding your agent into how you work, and how it will work, with you.

I recommend you use dictation for these answers (the microphone button on your mobile phone's keyboard), so you can walk and talk your way through it, like a conversation.

If you need help setting up your first AI Agent, I can help with that.

If you want to figure out what AI Agents can do in your business, I can help you do that too.

I'm now providing AI Agent Assessments - 2 x 45-minute calls, with a customised report delivered in between. I'll ask you a bunch of questions about your business, and develop a report (with the help of my AI Agents, of course) to identify the 3 highest-impact implementations for you to focus on, with guidance for taking those next steps.

Find out more here:

https://agent-agency.team/ai-agent-assessment/

🛠️ Expert Interview with Mel Kettle

[10:59]

Watch Now

📰 New AI News This Week

Anthropic restored Fable 5 access to subscribers (pay-as-you-go pricing after today)
The Center for AI Safety measured Fable 5 at the highest automation rate ever recorded for a model
OpenAI proposes giving the US Government a 5% ownership stake

👓 What I’m Reading

Career Advice in the Age of AI by Phil Chen - "The most important skills will be the ones related to problem selection and resource allocation."
What AI experts are telling their children about the future in NZ - Paywalled piece by Mitchell Hageman (featuring 4 local AI experts, including me!)
The State of AI in the Enterprise by Box - "Agentic AI is here. The leading edge is capturing most of the value."

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