AI at work
It is a real assistant rather than a chat window: it runs on my own laptop, it knows the businesses I advise, and it does the parts of my week that were nothing but administrative work. I started it on 27 August 2026. This page is what it does, what it costs, and what it changed.
Why I built it
Four years of advisory work taught me exactly where a week leaks, and the leaks are not unique to me. If you run a business, you will recognise your own week in most of these.
You know the day: seven back to back meetings, every single one confirmed by hand. Read the calendar, copy the link, find the right chat, paste it, hope you did not put two people in the same room. On a seven-meeting day that is most of an hour gone.
What it means for you Your meeting confirms itself and the link reaches you without anyone touching it. Nothing about your slot depends on whether I got back to my desk.
Every new job starts the same way: send the checklist, wait, remind, remind again, and carry the whole thing in your head so nothing goes missing.
What it means for you Nothing you send gets lost, and nothing you send gets kept. It reads what you send, takes what the file needs, and the original is deleted.
Once you are dealing with hundreds of businesses a year, walking into a call cold, or half remembering their situation, is the fastest way to waste their time.
What it means for you I turn up to your meeting already briefed on where your file actually stands.
The paperwork does not stop when the meetings do. By the end of the last call you are usually too flat to plan tomorrow properly, so tomorrow gets planned badly.
What it means for you Your morning starts with what genuinely needs you in it, instead of a guess.
Reports, follow-ups, records, backups. On a small team all of it lands on you, and most of it gets done after hours.
What it means for you The work that does not need a human runs while you sleep.
How it happened
I did not set out to build infrastructure. I set out to stop doing the same task forty times.
Seven client meetings a day, all scheduling, confirming, chasing and recording done manually.
I started with a platform called Vellum. The very first job I gave it was to find ways to automate the client work, and to build this website so the work could reach people.
The first automated tasks went in, in their most primitive form: jobs that ran to a schedule whether or not I was at my desk, alongside the site you are reading. This is the part nobody warns you about. A workflow is never finished, it is iterated until it holds.
I migrated to Hermes Agent, self hosted. This is the day it stopped being a chat window and started being infrastructure I own.
Meeting confirmations, client memory, overnight triage, backups and daily briefs. All of it built in eleven days.
What it does
Six things it handles for me now. None of them are glamorous, and that is the point.
Confirms client meetings, creates the Zoom, sends the link back, and watches for anything that failed to confirm so nothing quietly falls through.
Sorts what arrived overnight, tells me which chats actually need me, and acknowledges a brand new enquiry so nobody is left staring at silence.
Almost a thousand notes about the businesses I advise. Before I speak to you, I ask it what I know about your file.
Reads what clients send, pulls out the figures and details that matter, and deletes the source file afterwards.
A written brief before my day starts, a wrap when it ends, and a daily record of what actually happened.
Backups, health checks and a guard that watches my own systems. It runs whether I am awake, and it is the reason I can leave things alone.
What is actually running
If someone told me they had an assistant, this is the part I would want to see. Everything below is running on the day this page was last checked.
Last checked 23 September 2026. Everything above is live, not planned.
Anyone can show you a list of wins. These are the ones that did not survive, and why.
A reply gap monitor
It read stale snapshots and started telling me clients had gone quiet when they had not. Wrong information is worse than none, so I deleted it instead of patching it.
A task board
I built myself a kanban board and never opened it once. I work one thing at a time. The board was solving a problem I do not have.
The rules
Anyone can tell you what their AI is capable of. The limits are the more useful conversation, and they are the part that touches you, so here are mine.
It drafts, schedules, remembers and reminds. Every judgement on a client file is mine. If something reaches you with my name on it, I decided it.
When you send me paperwork, it is read and the details that matter are pulled out. The source file is then deleted. Hundreds of client submissions have gone that way, including tenancy agreements and identity documents. What stays is a written note, on a machine I own.
My personal conversations are walled off from it completely. The automations touch work conversations only, and only in the shapes I approved in advance.
No client name, registration number or case detail from my advisory work appears on this site, or in anything the assistant produces in public.
This is my own setup, on my own machine, paid for out of my own pocket. It is a personal project, unrelated to my employer and unrelated to any grant or funding.
What it costs
People assume this is either free or ruinously expensive. It is neither, and the subscription is the least interesting number on this page.
The bill
What that bought last month
Verified from the subscription account on 23 September 2026.
US$0
A free chat window. Genuinely useful, and where almost everyone should start. It will not know your files, it will not run on a schedule, and it will not be working while you are not.
US$20 to 30 a month
A professional chat subscription and the habit to use it. For most small businesses this is where nearly all of the gain is, and it needs nobody to maintain it.
The subscription, plus someone to build and keep it
What I have. The licence is the cheap part. The real cost is the weeks of building and the maintenance, which never really stops.
My advice to any owner: rung 01 is free and most of the value is sitting right there. Do not go anywhere near rung 03 until you have properly worn out rung 02.
If you want one
Before you spend a dollar on any of this.
Not a strategy, not a roadmap. One recurring job, done the same way every time, that costs you an hour a week. That is the only starting point worth having.
Write the task out in the exact order it happens. If you cannot describe it precisely, no tool can do it for you, and you will buy something that sits unused.
The surprise is never the building. It is that something has to keep watching it afterwards. Mine gets checked every single day, by me.
If you want to talk about any of this, my door is open. It is the same door as the rest of my work.
The short version, for anyone who wants the mechanics rather than the story.
Contact
Whether you have a project in mind or just want to explore what is possible, I would love to hear from you.
WhatsApp meUsually reply within 1 working day