In the last two notes I wrote about how a business's IT systems mature in layers, and why you need a real workflow before you can automate it. Both could be read as saying "get your house in order before you touch AI."
For traditional automation, that's mostly true. For AI agents, it isn't. What surprises me most about the current generation of agents is that a business can start with them at any point on the maturity ladder, including the very bottom.
A DJ with no systems at all
For the past week I've been working with a wedding DJ who had been through months without new enquiries. He's a real professional: more than 18 years in the business and over a thousand weddings. He knows how to read a couple and shape the night around what they picture as a joyful celebration. What he doesn't have is IT systems. He barely has a website.
By the maturity ladder, he's at stage zero. No CRM, no mailing list, no automations, nothing to integrate. The traditional advice would be to build all of that first.
Instead, I gave the problem to my team of AI agents: find leads that match his ideal client profile. After an initial discussion about who he serves best and where, they were working within a few hours. They built and launched an email campaign to wedding venues in our local area, and to premium venues further afield where his experience is a selling point.
One week in:
- He's on the preferred vendor list at around half a dozen venues.
- A new booking has landed.
- The campaign isn't even halfway through.
The agents aren't done, either. They're working a strategic marketing plan with a defined KPI, and they'll keep working it, following up and adjusting, until they hit it. They don't get tired, they don't get discouraged by a quiet inbox, and they don't forget to follow up on a Thursday.
Agents aren't just for big business
It's easy to assume AI agents belong to companies with data teams, integration platforms and an ERP. This example points the other way. The business with no systems at all may be where an agent makes the biggest difference, because there's no existing process for it to fit around. It just does work that wasn't getting done.
There are plenty of options on the table, too: off-the-shelf assistants, agent harnesses, custom-built agent teams. You don't need all your infrastructure in place to get real value from any of them.
But the advantage scales with the tools
Here's the other half of the picture. An agent is only as capable as the tools you give it.
The DJ campaign works because the job is well-bounded: research venues, write personal outreach, send it, follow up, track the replies. Give an agent a CRM and it can also remember every conversation. Give it access to a calendar and it can check availability before promising a date. Give it an integration layer across a business's systems and it can work on the business itself, not just alongside it.
So the maturity layers still matter. They just stop being a gate you have to pass through first. They become a multiplier on what your agents can do.
The same goes for how much you should trust them. An agent sending venue outreach for a DJ is low-risk. An agent that touches payments, or sensitive records like the children's files a childcare centre holds, needs proper interfaces to work through and a human who approves what it does. Where the stakes are higher, the case for building the systems underneath first gets stronger, and the agent comes second.
Where to start
Wherever your business sits right now, there's probably a job an agent could start on this week: lead generation, follow-ups, research, triage. Start with something bounded, where success is easy to measure. Then, as your systems mature, give the agents more to work with.
If you'd like to find the right first job for an agent in your business, a Systems Health Check is a good place to start, whether you have ten SaaS platforms or barely a website.