My Agents Turned Out More Reliable Than My Assistant

I'm extremely meticulous about my brand and the quality of what goes out under my name. That's one of my real fears with agents, having them out there doing who knows what. When I first built my Scout agent, his job was chasing down invoices that hadn't been paid yet. He got his wires crossed once and went after a client who had already paid in full. I had a little explaining to do. It wasn't the end of the world.

That's the small version of what scares me. It's why I put in ten times the normal amount of time building the rules my agents have to follow no matter what happens. They can't talk about numbers. They can't talk about money. They can't touch any of my logins or my passwords, and they can't spend my money. I've drilled that in so deep it gets annoying sometimes. One of them will tell me, you put that in my rules, I can't do that. I have to override it myself and say I'm giving you permission, just this once.

I run about 140 agents now, sorted into four trust levels. L1 drafts it and I approve it, but it waits on me to say go. L2 is the first autonomous step, where it drafts and sends on its own and I check the work after the fact. L3 is the top, and I only trust two agents there. Axis, my main one, and the agent that handles my contracts, because I've put that one to work.

I used to pour everything I had into a new human employee. I had a virtual assistant in Colombia. English wasn't her first language, so I had her run everything through AI before it reached a client. I recorded every training session we did and turned them into SOP documents, a whole executive assistant manual built just for her. I think she looked at it maybe in the first month she worked with us. After that, everything kind of went downhill.

I let her go four months ago. Normally that would have had me scrambling for the next hire.

She was still around long enough to watch Axis come into existence. I gave him his own login inside the CRM that runs as our single source of truth. He started leaving comments everywhere and updating everything, and she asked me why Axis was doing so much in there. I told her that's exactly what I'd been asking her to do for an entire year.