THE NUMBER
Ask the small business owners who actually use AI what it did to their people, and 52% say it added a hand while only 8% say it took one (the SBE Council, a small-business advocacy group, surveyed more than 500 owners this year). The fear every owner has been sold is replacement; the ones actually doing it report close to the opposite. That is what this newsletter is about: the next worker you put to work, not the last one you cut.
3 THINGS HAPPENING RIGHT NOW
An online store handed 70% of its support tickets to a chatbot
Outlines, which sells recyclable shower liners, runs an AI chatbot that handles up to 70% of its customer support tickets. The company, run by CEO Luke Barkley Young, used to pay an outside agency to field those messages. Moving the work to the agent saves it about $5,000 a month.
Most contractors believe in AI. Almost none have turned one on.
A field-service software company surveyed about 1,000 home contractors: roughly 74% see AI as a way to work faster, but only about 25% actually use one. Among the few who do, around 48% report getting more done. For most of them what stops them is not price, it is not knowing where to start, which is the exact wall this week is built to get you over.
THE DEEP DIVE
They handed the phone to an agent and went home
Tony Naser runs two Crush Pizza shops in Massachusetts and a Mickey’s N.Y. Pizza in New Hampshire. The phone was the problem every restaurant owner knows: at least a thousand calls a month at each store. In 2024 he handed it to an AI agent that answers and takes orders on its own. He says he can’t imagine going back to answering the phones on a Friday night.
Here is the part that matters. Naser now employs more people than before he turned it on, not fewer. The agent took the one job nobody could do well while also making pizza, and that freed his staff to work in the kitchen and elsewhere in the shop. Another owner in the piece, Costa Alexandrou, went home early last Halloween during one of his busiest nights, which would have been unthinkable before.
It broke, too. One customer whose order arrived missing her salad got stuck in a loop and couldn’t reach a person, even after calling back the next day. That is the lesson built into this issue: an agent earns the night shift, it does not start there. Any business drowning in the same repetitive calls, a clinic, a salon, a shop, can hand over the same task, as long as it watches what breaks.
ONE THING TO TRY THIS WEEK
Week 1 of 4: Your next agent, on probation
The pizzeria owner did not hand over his hardest job. He handed over his most repetitive one, and watched it closely before trusting it alone. That is how you hire your next agent: pick the task that runs constantly and is cheap to get wrong, put it on probation, and let it run while you sleep only once it has earned that.
Make a list of the tasks you repeat every week. The ones that eat twenty minutes at a time: answering the same customer questions, chasing invoices, sorting new leads, sending the same follow-up. Don’t pick one yet. Just write them all down.
Open Claude Code and hand it the list. On a Mac open Terminal, on Windows open PowerShell, type
claudeand press enter. Then paste: “Here is a list of tasks I repeat every week. Rank them by how often each one runs and how cheap it is to get wrong. Tell me the single best one to hand to an agent first, and why.” You want the task that runs constantly and does little damage if it slips, not the one that hurts the most.Tell Claude to set that one task up on probation. Paste: “Set this up to run in draft mode, where you prepare the result and I approve it before anything actually happens. Give me a one-line check I can answer yes or no each day. Then write the rule for when it is safe to let you run on your own.” Claude builds it and tells you when it is ready.
Run it on probation for about two weeks. Each day, answer the one-line check: did it get it right, yes or no? Once the yes runs are clean, let Claude promote it to running on its own, overnight, while you sleep. Promoting it that far can take one setup step to connect it to your inbox or your tools, and Claude will tell you exactly what it needs. Keep a human hand on anything touching money, legal, or anything you can’t undo. One insurance broker who lets an AI answer her phones put the rule plainly: “If it’s not working, I’ll can it.”
Stuck? Reply to this email. I’ll help.
WHAT’S COMING
Next issue: your second agent, and the trick that makes two of them hand work back and forth to each other without you standing in the middle.
Manu