I built a CRM with AI. Then my agents started running the business

A couple of weeks ago, on a wet Saturday lunchtime, I sat at my desk barking orders to Claude while it was quietly building me a sales database in the background. As I was doing this, I was also, on the other side of my desk, losing my sh*t at the printer.

One of us was being systematic and productive. It wasn't me.

That weekend I ended up with a working CRM.

A fully functioning system that consolidated contacts from across my messy lists, cross-referenced data, set up automated updates and connected to other tools, including Mailchimp. I wrote about it, made a YouTube video about it, and asked in the video whether this was agentic AI's ChatGPT moment? Watch it here if you missed it: Claude Dispatch Built Me a CRM. Is This Agentic AI's ChatGPT Moment?

Since then, things have moved on. Blimey. And then some.

From one CRM to a team

Here's what I didn't fully appreciate at the time. Once you have one agent that reliably cracks on with work, the question changes. It stops being "can AI do this?" and becomes "what else could this do?"

Yes, dear reader, I kept going.

Every time a job came back done, I gave it another. And then another. Some of them I gave a name and a job description. I wasn't necessarily setting out to build a team to be fair. I just kept saying yes…

So what I ended up with is a team of agents, each with its own ‘patch’ in business. Finance. Marketing. Sales. Design. Operations. Code. Data. Validation. Security. With a coordinator sitting on top of all of them, routing work and keeping the rest of them on brief. You can’t get the staff.

I then built a brain for the business (insanely powerful in its own right): something they could all call on, and keep updated as they cracked on…‘cos y’know…context.

But the thing that’s surprised me most is how often they now do things I haven't asked for.

A couple of wow moments?

Well, three stand out.

One. Not long after I’d set them up, I got a message from Flo, my finance agent. One of my clients had given me the nod that an outstanding payment was on its way. A few days on, the money still hadn't landed.

Flo had been watching my bank transaction feed, matching expected invoices against what had actually cleared, and noticed the gap. Her message was along the lines of: “X from Y hasn’t paid….but they promised payment on Friday. You might want to chase that."

I’d not asked her to check: she'd done it because that's her job, and flagged the gap before I'd thought to look. Properly surreal.

"This one hasn't been paid. You might want to chase that."

Two. I'd been meaning to get a definitive set of brand guidelines written for years. Voice, tone, colours, type, logo rules, the lot.

Mae, my marketing agent, worked on the tone of voice side by reading back through everything we'd published, every email I'd written, the long-form posts on this very blog, and pulling out the patterns. And Pix, who’d joined the team as design lead, picked up the visual side. Logos, palette, type hierarchy, layout rules, asset inventory.

I was sat outside Tesco when I briefed them, and by the time I’d come home with the shopping I had a single set of brand guidelines. Madness.

Then it got deployed. The CRM, the proposals tool, the client area, the AI intelligence platform. Each surface brought into line with the guidelines in turn. A thing that would, in a previous life, have been a six-month project was done from start to finish between Friday evening and Monday afternoon.

Three. A new business meeting went into my calendar last week. A few hours later, a briefing appeared in my CRM. Company background, the people in the room, the services that might fit, suggested opening questions, things to avoid. No one had asked for it. One of the agents had spotted the meeting, pulled the research together, and filed the brief. INTO THE CRM, PEOPLE…

What it adds up to

None of this is magic. It's just that each agent is doing their bit, reliably, without needing to be reminded (most of the time), so there's less admin in my week, more thinking time, and the client-facing work is getting sharper, not thinner.

Things that were jobs on the long list are now running without me in the background. I'm not going to pretend the team is working perfectly: they need management. But jeepers, the things they’re doing for me…it’s nuts.

Where this goes next

Already clients have started asking how they can do this inside their own organisations. Not the training I do in The AI Advantage, which is about getting leaders confident with AI in their day-to-day. Something deeper. Hands-on and practical. How do you actually get this stuff running for your business?

So that's what I'm working on with a handful of clients now. Two formats. The Agent Advantage, which is the course that picks up where The AI Advantage leaves off. And Agent Action Days, where I come in and we spend the day building the first bits of your agent team together.

This is for people who've done the foundational work with me and are ready to go further.

Interested? Let's have that chat, one-to-one.