You Don’t Need AI Agents

AI agents can open a lot of doors but also break a lot of windows

It’s time for you to get back to coding again – hardcore coding if you know what you’re doing. But if you don’t know what you’re doing, it’s never been safer to jump in and build all the business and tech things you need.

The one thing I don’t think you should do, regardless of your coding skills – something I’m begging you not to do – is unleash a bunch of agents and tell them to build all the tech that’s going to run your business. Or, even worse, the tech that will be your business. Please don’t do that. It will blow up in your face.

You don’t need AI agents. You’ll want AI agents, if you’re building your tech and business stack properly.

Here’s how to figure out where to draw the line between want and need when it comes to unleashing the power of AI agents.

The New Entrepreneur and the Giant Blimp

Let’s start with something that sounds like a fairy tale, but it’s really the origin story of every single entrepreneur ever. Bear with me. For my advice about AI agents to click, you’ll need the setup.

I spent last weekend coaching up a first time entrepreneur. I never spend weekends doing this but this entrepreneur is special. Here’s why.

She’s already got a working business, one that puts the “minimum” in minimum viable product, like it’s held together by duct tape and paper receipts, but it’s making money and it’s profitable. She’s also got her entire endgame scoped, exactly what the business will look like when it’s generating billions in revenue and millions in profit.

And here’s the thing. That second part, the billion dollar part? It’s legit. Well, as legit as it can be, anyway. Her advisors are all on board and she’s won awards for the model and her pitch, for what that’s worth. And I know. I’ve been an entrepreneur forever, so there’s a side of me that says that is worth absolutely nothing.

But her endgame billion-dollar business is floating there in the sky like a big, beautiful, delicate blimp, ready to soar like whatever metaphor young entrepreneurs are using these days. In my day it was rockets, but kids are different nowadays.

Here’s her problem.

The Platform Always Comes First

The reason why I took the weekend is because she’s struggling, and has been for months, on trying to build that blimp.

Her problem is, in a nutshell, the same problem every single entrepreneur has gone through – the good and the bad, the successful and the failures, the blue-collar self-taught self-made billionaire and the want-repreneur always-broke “idea” guy (or gal, but almost always guy, I don’t know why).

She’s trying to build the blimp when she should be focused on the launch platform.

We all do it. We don’t start a business for the mundane transactional nature of selling something to a customer. We do it to build an empire, of whatever size and for whatever reason, on the back of a glorious flying machine that is at once impressive but also holds unlimited potential.

Now, she dabbles in code and tech. She has followed the AI rush and all the trends and hype and fear and FOMO. She’s tried things out to evaluate them. And after months of trying to get her blimp in the air, taking one step forward and two steps back, she came to me and asked if and how to just set up a team of AI agents to go ahead and get that bleeping blimp up in the bleeping air.

Oh no. No. The first reason is it’ll cost you a fortune you don’t have. That was a Friday morning, so then we set up some time to talk. And now I’ve whittled that talk down for you.

My Own Personal Agent Team

I knew that, at some point, I would need to address the question about unleashing an army of AI agents to build a business from scratch or from a current “AI-free” state.

So I did it. A while ago.

Earlier this year I consolidated my own personal AI agent team into a coding team and named them after characters in the Wickiverse – Winston is my orchestrator, Caine is my reviewer. Because he’s blind but he sees everything. Get it? John Wick is the bomb, yo.

I put them to work on one of my back-burner startup ideas – for which I already had heaps of documented this-and-that to repurpose into instructional material – and I let them go. It was an unmitigated and immediate disaster, one that eventually, after weeks of shout-typing through Telegram like an angry monkey, I gave up trying to un-disaster.

After dozens of repeated attempts to fix an ugly, broken public-facing UI that did the wrong things on the backend and eventually one morning was entirely replaced by some hacker-bot’s knockoff storefront, I started over and deployed my AI agent team how I should have in the first place.

You can make your own “forfeit” joke here if you know Wick.

Why You Want AI Agents But Don’t Need Them

So let’s make this super simple, because it also happens to be the same way me and my clients and colleagues are using AI agents. And it also happens to be the same way we build our businesses, which is what I told this talented first-time entrepreneur.

The reason why you can’t make any progress on building the blimp is because you don’t build from the blimp down to the ground. You build from the launch platform up – that boring little duct-taped business of yours that actually has customers and is generating revenue and profit.

Amazon started out by selling books and CDs online, blah, blah, blah, but it’s true and we never listen.

How do you generate more revenue and remain profitable? How do you evolve your customers from transactions into loyal assets? How do you bolt on the next thing that’s going to make your launch platform stronger and shoot that blimp higher when the time is right?

Oh, and by the way, that first iteration of your blimp is going to be a model like Camelot.

Then deploy your agents on the platform, not the blimp. Get them working on the rote, repetitive, boring tasks to get those off your plate so you can remove the duct tape from the platform.

That’s your best, most potentially successful AI agent use case, plus you can let them grow with you, and their mistakes will be less expensive. It’s what I do, it’s what all the cool kids are doing. There are even smart people out there who will tell you how.

If you think you need an AI agent or an army of them to get something done, figure out why, then figure out how to orchestrate the orchestrator, to use a little cool-kid AI speak, so the AI agents will do what you want, and do it properly.

Now would be a good time to join my email list, a growing army of professionals who want a take on tech and business that might include a John Wick or Monty Python reference.

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