Here's something that's been on my mind lately...
Most business owners think about hiring one person to handle one role.
You need a marketer, you hire a marketer.
You need someone to handle leads, you hire someone for that.
But what if you didn't have to?
See, the conversation around AI has shifted.
It's no longer about "can AI help me with this one task."
It's about "can AI run this entire function."
And the answer is increasingly yes.
Let me break down what I mean:
The old way:
- Hire a VA for $3-5K/month to handle emails, scheduling, and follow-ups
- Hire a social media manager for $2-4K/month to post and respond
- Hire a bookkeeper, a marketer, a customer support person...
The new way:
- One AI agent system that handles all of the above
- It works 24/7, never calls in sick, doesn't need benefits
- Costs a fraction of one full-time employee
- You set it up once and it's running (you only maintain and optimize after)
Now before you think "this sounds too good to be true" I'm not saying AI replaces humans entirely.
Not yet, anyway.
What I'm saying is: the businesses figuring this out right now are getting a massive edge.
You can move at the speed of 25 people with just one subagent.
In fact, have you heard that Anthropic's marketing team (Claude AI), is being operated by one person with a team of agents?
For reference, we're talking about a multi billion dollar company...
You can read more about that from this article I found here.
If traditional massive tech companies are moving at 1000x the speed with just one cracked person in a key position armed with agents, why can't you?
What is that costing you to stay where you are?
Business owners moving forward in 2026 are not spending $10K/month on a small team.
They're spending a few hundred on operational costs for these AI systems to run and handle the bulk of the work, then using their human team for the high-touch stuff that actually moves the needle.
Most likely just one person at this point.
In fact (fun fact) I was able to scale a mobile app last year to thousands of years solo before I ever brought on an organic marketing teammate or influencer manager.
It was just me and an AI system.
In hindsight, I could've probably eliminated the need for influencer relations and management with AI but at the time, I don't believe the agentic infrastructure was there as it is to date.
Today, you can easily do this.
Customer service? No brainer. Just use either a tool like n8n or OpenClaw and plug it into your email stack.
Influencer management? Easy. Plug OpenClaw or another agentic system into your inbox, give it a framework for how to manage and prospect for you, and let it manage your CRM.
Organic marketing? This one's tricky but if you got the system to go viral, you can systemize it with a subagent and pump out hundreds of pieces of content weekly in a matter of minutes.
The tools and infrastructure are all there.
What REALLY enables these agents are the systems and processes they follow to enable an outcome to occur.
Without a proper system, they're doing busy work with no clear ROI.
That's why I'm a huge proponent of either:
-
Having a clear system for your agent to operationalize and systemize anything you're looking to cut costs in and increase speed velocity
-
Create an agent (or heck just ask something like Claude) to find you the system, create a set of hypotheses, let it run experiments, and once it has identified something, let it begin cranking that out through an automated subagent on scheduled times
The question isn't whether AI can help your business (it surely can, duh).
It's how much of your operation could run on autopilot if you set it up right.
I'll keep sharing more on this.
There's a lot more to unpack over the coming weeks.
