25 AI audits. One pattern.

Building AI Agent #161

What’s in this edition?

As you know, we stopped reporting on AI agent news last month and plunged fully into building AI agents for business owners.

But I missed writing this newsletter!

So I’ve been toying with the idea of bringing the newsletter back, different from what it was.

Edition #161 is the first in a new format. Less news, more behind the scenes. The businesses we're auditing, the agents we're building, what surprised us along the way.

Tell me what you think.

OVER 25 AUDITS IN APRIL

We audited over 25 businesses in April. The common theme genuinely surprised me: most operators don't know where to use AI in their business.

They know it matters. They've read the headlines, seen the demos, maybe even paid for a tool or two. But ask them where AI should actually plug into their day-to-day, and they aren’t sure.

When you've run the same business for years, you stop seeing the work that could be done differently. Our brains aren't wired yet to spot where AI fits.

As I always tell operators on our audit calls, think of your business in terms of workflows. Processes that happen from start to finish.

As you start to think like this, you can slowly start to identify the high value workflows ripe for AI. Either to save your team time or make you more money.

I will share 2 audits that stood out to me this month. Both became clients.

THE REALTOR’S MLS AGENT

The realtor who didn’t know where to use AI.

A successful realtor with his own group, hundreds of past clients, business built entirely on relationships. When I asked where he thought AI could help, he shrugged. His work is trust and follow-through. AI felt like the opposite of that.

Then he told me about his mornings.

Every day with coffee, of course, he scrolls all new MLS listings. He's matching them in his head against past clients he's known for years. Each with their own preferences: street, neighborhood, square footage, school district, etc.

On his busy weeks, he skips the search entirely to service current clients. He told me every few months, he would lose a prior client because they found the house themselves eventually. He just did not have the time to do this daily.

Let’s do the math:

• Average house he sells: $900,000

• Commission (conservatively 2%): $18,000

• Clients lost/year: ~8

• Annual lost commission: $144,000

Just 1 lost client is nearly $20k!

This was the first thing we uncovered immediately during the audit. We just delivered the build. An MLS matching agent that runs while he sleeps, works, vacations…24/7. This isn't a how do we replace the realtor exercise. It’s how do you do more with what you have.

THE DENTIST PAYROLL AGENT

The dental owner that knew AI mattered, but…

Over 15 locations, 20+ doctors, very sharp owner. He didn't need convincing to use AI in his business. He came in with the right instinct: keep it on the corporate ops side, leave patient-facing alone for now.

But "AI for ops" is still broad. He didn’t know where to start.

So we walked through his actual operations. I talked to every key employee about where their time actually goes.

We surfaced two things. Chart compliance, a dentist manually reviewing every patient note for legal documentation. And doctor payroll, which is the one I want to dig into here.

Every month, the same dentist spends 3 full days extracting payroll data from one system, loading it into another, and emailing each doctor their pay breakdown. Not patient-facing. Just moving data movement from one place to another.

Let’s do the math:

• Dentist hourly rate: ~$200

• Time doing payroll: 3 days/month (6 hrs a day) x 12 months: 216 hours/year

• Annual cost: $43,200 in clinical time spent on admin

This is time their head dentist is not seeing patients, coaching other dentists, or running the practice.

WANT AN AUDIT?

If you're a business owner and you've been reading this newsletter thinking "I should really figure out how this AI thing fits in my business," now's the time.

We're opening up 10 more free AI audit slots this month.

We normally charge $250 for audits. This is a 30-minute 1-on-1 AI automation audit where we’ll walk through your business, identify where AI could have the biggest impact, and give you a practical plan you can act on, whether that's with us or on your own.

If you're interested, fill out our form and I’ll be in touch:

P.S. If you applied for an audit but didn’t hear back, check your spam folder.

🔍 Workshop Sundays

Being Chicago based, we get the opportunity to run in-person AI workshops in a large city. A couple Sundays ago we ran our latest workshop with just 20 business owners in a room, building their first agent in Claude Cowork.

The meta moment: I used Cowork to prepare for the workshop, and I told them that.

Attendees signed up through Stripe, so I had their names but no business context. I built an agent to research every person in the room and drop a structured brief into my Gmail before the workshop.

I then had a second agent track pre-event details in an excel tracker. Which attendees got their confirmation email, event details, and their 1 month free subscription to Claude (a gift for attending the workshop). Since I had the agent scanning my inbox hourly, I was able to track questions at scale: people missing their Claude Pro invites, venue questions, tech issues, etc. Stuff I'd normally be tracking manually days leading up to the workshop.

Showing these 2 agents was a big moment for everyone. They saw a small slice of what agents can do and understood their power. Hearing about it is one thing. Seeing them run live feels completely different.i

That's the actual lesson. The agents that change your business aren't the flashy ones. They're the small ones running quietly in the background while you do the work that matters.

Thank you for reading! Thank you for replying.

This AI wave isn't slowing down. Neither are we.

Keep learning and building.

✌️AP

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