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I am in the process of attempting to have AI run my business. I'm actually making very good progress, but it's happening in pieces - I document some task and ha

I am in the process of attempting to have AI run my business. I'm actually making very good progress, but it's happening in pieces - I document some task and have it take over, or I give it something to handle while staying in the loop and providing feedback until it's in good shape. At this point it's handling large swathes of my operations, marketing and finance. The experience of getting it there makes me pretty skeptical of the idea of a general business agent like this. First, because I still find myself having to review some categories of work for errors. These are decreasing over time, but they're still there. I fully believe that as models get better, errors will decline, but I am somewhat surprised to see some of the errors current models make given their intelligence. A common set is having Claude take some product photos and turn them into lifestyle ones using ChatGPT via Claude in Chrome. It's a pretty well-honed workflow at this point, but it'll still return images where the product is obviously not correct and seemingly not notice them. Anyway, even if the agents are "perfect" in terms of their ability to execute tasks, there's still just an enormous amount of nuance and context in each business that takes a ton of time to convey. I've been at this for a couple of years now, and I'm still clarifying things. Now maybe an agent starting a business from scratch would have a better time since it's not inheriting all of this, but to have one run an existing business requires a very extended handoff, even if the agent is objectively amazing at all aspects of running a business.

brandon272 19d ago
> At this point it's handling large swathes of my operations, marketing and finance. Can you expand on this in terms of what it is handling specifically and how?
- josh_p 19d ago
  He writes about it on his substack. https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/ https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/
  - Denzel 19d ago
    Cool that he's writing about this publicly, but for someone that's so business-minded I find it odd that he never renders any of these AI experiments in terms of ROI. Hard to find any signal in those posts on whether it's profitable to automate these processes with AI vs. alternatives.
    - idopmstuff 19d ago
      That's a fair criticism for some of it, but in a lot of cases I try to automate things that don't have alternatives because they're unique to me (e.g. all the brands I own in my fund have one bank account but need to be tracked separately for investor payback purposes, so I have a Claude skill that takes all of my transactions and assigns them to the various Google Sheets ledgers I have). In other cases I'm doing stuff that's complex enough that there's no real "alternative" at this point that doesn't involve hiring one or more people and working with them for an extended period. My next set of posts is going to be about my latest acquisition and how AI redesigned a Shopify store then designed and launched Meta ads, all of which only took a couple of days but is going to easily push revenue up by something like 40% this year. The money made is great, as is the money saved on people I would've hired to do this sort of thing, but the real cherry on top is that even hiring someone would've required me to spend waaaaay more time than I did here. So big ROI on the money but also the time, which is arguably more important, since time savings permit me to acquire more brands.
      - halfcat 19d ago
        > unique to me Ah, so it’s ”No Silver Bullet” (1986) [1] all over again. Thinking out loud here... AI mainly helps reduce accidental complexity. It can help one understand essential complexity, but essential complexity must still be paid. You describe doing the essential, irreducible part. And that’s specific to your needs, depends on the problem you’ve chosen, understanding reality of your domain, evaluating tradeoffs, and being accountable for the outcome. Right? [1] https://cekrem.github.io/posts/there-is-still-no-silver-bullet/ https://cekrem.github.io/posts/there-is-still-no-silver-bull...
joshgachnang 19d ago
How are you automating all the parts? OpenClaw/Hermes?
- idopmstuff 19d ago
  Mostly Claude Code and a lot of internal tools that it's built. I've honestly still not had a chance to play with those kinds of harnesses yet, but my impression is they're just a better way for you to instruct an assistant to take care of things in order to get them done. My goal isn't to be managing an assistant, it's to get things automated without my input (and where my input is needed, have the assistant escalate to me).
jamilton 19d ago
For anything visual, they are still effectively blind, right? Still just working off the image embedding, sometimes using scripts to actually inspect individual pixels.
- idopmstuff 19d ago
  Blind seems too far here - Claude's increasingly able to diagnose visual issues on its own. I used to have to check every single image it generated, but now it's at the point where it'll catch most bad ones and regenerate them before it gets to the review step. Still misses some, though.
- KPGv2 19d ago
  no. I just used Gemini to update a website I'm managing for a charity, and one of those steps involved Gemini, on its own, offering to scan the website for one of our beneficiaries, specifically the header images, to see if there was more information to include in our writeup about the beneficiary. And it did it quite well.
  - jamilton 18d ago
    Right, I forgot that they also read and parse text in images well.
wartywhoa23 19d ago
What is your target audience and what do you sell them?
- j2kun 19d ago
  From their blog [1] "I acquire e-commerce brands that sell on Amazon" Honestly it sounds like the OP is part of the machine that makes Amazon such a trashy marketplace these days. [1]: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/15-ways-im-using-ai-to-manage-my https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/15-ways-im-using...
  - dools 19d ago
    One step up from “vending machine” as far as business complexity goes.
    - idopmstuff 19d ago
      I suspect you mean this as an insult, but it's not too far off. That was one of the main points of the business - each one is simple to run, so I can manage a lot of them. And that was before AI got really good. Anyway, I'm sure the app you makes that lets you get a phone number that can send image messages is very complex, and I think that's very nice.
  - idopmstuff 19d ago
    Well that's not very nice! And for the record, I only buy brands that sell high-quality products. Marketing and operations I can fix, but if the stuff they sell is no good, there's no point.
    - deleted 19d ago
      [deleted]
    - cellu 19d ago
      How do you identify them and choose what to invest in? I guess you do not really have access to their technical specifics or sales volumes.
trencedamp 19d ago
> I am somewhat surprised to see some of the errors current models make given their intelligence They have no intelligence. These are very very very refined prediction engines. > A common set is having Claude take some product photos and turn them into lifestyle ones using ChatGPT via Claude in Chrome. It's a pretty well-honed workflow at this point, but it'll still return images where the product is obviously not correct and seemingly not notice them. Obvious to you or I, or someone with actual intelligence. But things like this slip by a frontier model in the same way AI from a few years ago would generate an image with seven fingers. They do not count. They do not understand. They do not consider. No matter how good these models appear to be at intelligent tasks, it's foolish to give them "a company" to run, because they cannot understand when they've made a mistake the way even the least competent human can.
- jeremyjh 19d ago
  > They have no intelligence. These are very very very refined prediction engines. "Very refined prediction engine" is not a bad working definition for intelligence. It is not the only component you need, but it might be the most important over-all capability. If its making lots of errors, its not doing a very good job of predicting the outcome of its actions.
  - zallen 19d ago
    It's a terrible definition of intelligence. Intelligence is far more than just predicting things based on a massive set of similar things. We do do pattern recognition, but I don't need to have seen 10k dogs to be able to recognize a dog. And it's not a difference of degree, either. "Meaning" is something I am able to derive from my experiences, and it is not something an LLM does or will ever be able to do (nor is training data even analogous to having experiences in any way shape or form.)
    - senordevnyc 19d ago
      Is "meaning" inherent to intelligence? Is emotion and the ability to have a subjective experience inherent to meaning? Genuine questions that I'm not sure we have good answers for yet. Your other point that humans need very few examples for learning vs. what LLMs need is an interesting one. A few researchers talked about this very thing on the most recent episode of Dwarkesh's podcast. My own view is that it seems unfair to compare an LLM's training with just what a human gets over the course of a lifetime, because our brains have been trained by a billion years of evolution for pattern matching. I'm not at all confident that AI models won't catch up.
bmau5 19d ago
Open to sharing what workflow you're using on the lifestyle image creation? I've tried the Higgsfield MCP, and direct Figma integrations - but keep running into hallucinations on product dimensions, etc.
- idopmstuff 17d ago
  At this point, I mostly ask Claude to use Claude in Chrome to use ChatGPT to create lifestyle images (because I am cheap and I don't want to pay for API usage when I could get them free) based on whatever product shots I have. Sometimes I give it some more specific direction about what I want, but usually for the first pass I just tell it to make 10 or 20 or whatever and see what it gives me. When it's done, it generates a web page with the images and a simple UI for feedback, then uses the feedback I give it to iterate. It has always been very good at styling things well (i.e. if I'm making infographic-style images, I give it an example of one and it's good at copying the style/fonts/colors/etc.), but I suspect I get better-than-average results in terms of the content just because it has built up so much context from doing this and taking my feedback across so many different brands and images. The product dimension thing really stopped being an issue for me with ChatGPT Images 2, and the new 2.5 is better. If you're running into trouble, there are some cases where Gemini is better, but they're rare. But I will say if you're prompting yourself and running into issues, you should get Claude/ChatGPT to help you write the prompt that goes to the image model. They're very good at it. A little more on my process here: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-way-i-have-used-ai-to https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-way-...
gavinboston 19d ago
> I am in the process of attempting to have AI run my business. I'm actually making very good progress, but it's happening in pieces Very cool! What's been the hardest part? Have you successfully automated non-trivial communications? (for example with prospects, customers, vendors, partners, etc.) > maybe an agent starting a business from scratch would have a better time This describes the project I've been working on since last year, with agents in company roles, deciding on strategy, collaborating, and making progress (admittedly nonlinear). Some parts of the platform are stronger than others. So far the company agents have developed a company strategy and plans for executing it, launched a website and blog, and built and operate two products, one free and one paid. But I would be wary of using a third party like Pion as a platform for running a business. It's one thing to know that your prompts and responses will be used to train models in the future, by companies that have a huge sea of relatively unstructured data. But it's another to hand over to another company every aspect of your strategy and operations, available to that company in real time and structured in such a way it's quick and easy to understand what you're up to and where you are going. Especially if it's being offered for free and at scale. With a free offering, value creation will likely come from either customer data or from escalating prices once customers are locked in. And even if neither of those happen, you now have a huge single point of failure for your entire organization. Seems like there are lots of strategic risks in there for the users.
- idopmstuff 17d ago
  > Very cool! What's been the hardest part? Have you successfully automated non-trivial communications? (for example with prospects, customers, vendors, partners, etc.) Yeah, the most recent brand I acquired had enough customer contacts via FB/IG comments and messages, plus email, that I had Claude build out an application for me where it pulls those in as they come, drafts a response including any actions that need to be taken, and lets me edit or send. It takes any edits as feedback to refine its playbook, so its gotten pretty good now. Handles things like warranty claims (get picture of the damage plus order number, create replacement order, send email confirming replacement order) plus most common questions. Still entirely human in the loop, but I'm going to let it start handling common cases autonomously soon. On the topic of starting an autonomous agent-run business from scratch, I had Claude set up a bunch of websites that pull publicly available (but somewhat annoying to access) government data, display it in easy to read format and send weekly emails. It's now running on its own with a couple levels of management - first, it does a weekly review of Google Search Console/GA4 and updates or creates new content to try to improve things from an SEO perspective. Then second, once a day it tracks all of the problems that have arisen over the past day (usually issues pulling the data or issues with the prose the models write), corrects them, and then tries to improve the system to stop them from recurring. I'm not really keeping tracking of it at the moment - too much other stuff to do right now - but it's getting a trickle of subscribers and is slowly rising the SEO ranks, so for now I'm content to let it sit and see if it ever gets to the point of being monetizable.

brandon272 19d ago

> At this point it's handling large swathes of my operations, marketing and finance. Can you expand on this in terms of what it is handling specifically and how?

josh_p 19d ago
He writes about it on his substack. https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/ https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/
- Denzel 19d ago
  Cool that he's writing about this publicly, but for someone that's so business-minded I find it odd that he never renders any of these AI experiments in terms of ROI. Hard to find any signal in those posts on whether it's profitable to automate these processes with AI vs. alternatives.
  - idopmstuff 19d ago
    That's a fair criticism for some of it, but in a lot of cases I try to automate things that don't have alternatives because they're unique to me (e.g. all the brands I own in my fund have one bank account but need to be tracked separately for investor payback purposes, so I have a Claude skill that takes all of my transactions and assigns them to the various Google Sheets ledgers I have). In other cases I'm doing stuff that's complex enough that there's no real "alternative" at this point that doesn't involve hiring one or more people and working with them for an extended period. My next set of posts is going to be about my latest acquisition and how AI redesigned a Shopify store then designed and launched Meta ads, all of which only took a couple of days but is going to easily push revenue up by something like 40% this year. The money made is great, as is the money saved on people I would've hired to do this sort of thing, but the real cherry on top is that even hiring someone would've required me to spend waaaaay more time than I did here. So big ROI on the money but also the time, which is arguably more important, since time savings permit me to acquire more brands.
    - halfcat 19d ago
      > unique to me Ah, so it’s ”No Silver Bullet” (1986) [1] all over again. Thinking out loud here... AI mainly helps reduce accidental complexity. It can help one understand essential complexity, but essential complexity must still be paid. You describe doing the essential, irreducible part. And that’s specific to your needs, depends on the problem you’ve chosen, understanding reality of your domain, evaluating tradeoffs, and being accountable for the outcome. Right? [1] https://cekrem.github.io/posts/there-is-still-no-silver-bullet/ https://cekrem.github.io/posts/there-is-still-no-silver-bull...

joshgachnang 19d ago

How are you automating all the parts? OpenClaw/Hermes?

idopmstuff 19d ago
Mostly Claude Code and a lot of internal tools that it's built. I've honestly still not had a chance to play with those kinds of harnesses yet, but my impression is they're just a better way for you to instruct an assistant to take care of things in order to get them done. My goal isn't to be managing an assistant, it's to get things automated without my input (and where my input is needed, have the assistant escalate to me).

jamilton 19d ago

For anything visual, they are still effectively blind, right? Still just working off the image embedding, sometimes using scripts to actually inspect individual pixels.

idopmstuff 19d ago
Blind seems too far here - Claude's increasingly able to diagnose visual issues on its own. I used to have to check every single image it generated, but now it's at the point where it'll catch most bad ones and regenerate them before it gets to the review step. Still misses some, though.
KPGv2 19d ago
no. I just used Gemini to update a website I'm managing for a charity, and one of those steps involved Gemini, on its own, offering to scan the website for one of our beneficiaries, specifically the header images, to see if there was more information to include in our writeup about the beneficiary. And it did it quite well.
- jamilton 18d ago
  Right, I forgot that they also read and parse text in images well.

wartywhoa23 19d ago

What is your target audience and what do you sell them?

j2kun 19d ago
From their blog [1] "I acquire e-commerce brands that sell on Amazon" Honestly it sounds like the OP is part of the machine that makes Amazon such a trashy marketplace these days. [1]: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/15-ways-im-using-ai-to-manage-my https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/15-ways-im-using...
- dools 19d ago
  One step up from “vending machine” as far as business complexity goes.
  - idopmstuff 19d ago
    I suspect you mean this as an insult, but it's not too far off. That was one of the main points of the business - each one is simple to run, so I can manage a lot of them. And that was before AI got really good. Anyway, I'm sure the app you makes that lets you get a phone number that can send image messages is very complex, and I think that's very nice.
- idopmstuff 19d ago
  Well that's not very nice! And for the record, I only buy brands that sell high-quality products. Marketing and operations I can fix, but if the stuff they sell is no good, there's no point.
  - deleted 19d ago
    [deleted]
  - cellu 19d ago
    How do you identify them and choose what to invest in? I guess you do not really have access to their technical specifics or sales volumes.

trencedamp 19d ago

> I am somewhat surprised to see some of the errors current models make given their intelligence They have no intelligence. These are very very very refined prediction engines. > A common set is having Claude take some product photos and turn them into lifestyle ones using ChatGPT via Claude in Chrome. It's a pretty well-honed workflow at this point, but it'll still return images where the product is obviously not correct and seemingly not notice them. Obvious to you or I, or someone with actual intelligence. But things like this slip by a frontier model in the same way AI from a few years ago would generate an image with seven fingers. They do not count. They do not understand. They do not consider. No matter how good these models appear to be at intelligent tasks, it's foolish to give them "a company" to run, because they cannot understand when they've made a mistake the way even the least competent human can.

jeremyjh 19d ago
> They have no intelligence. These are very very very refined prediction engines. "Very refined prediction engine" is not a bad working definition for intelligence. It is not the only component you need, but it might be the most important over-all capability. If its making lots of errors, its not doing a very good job of predicting the outcome of its actions.
- zallen 19d ago
  It's a terrible definition of intelligence. Intelligence is far more than just predicting things based on a massive set of similar things. We do do pattern recognition, but I don't need to have seen 10k dogs to be able to recognize a dog. And it's not a difference of degree, either. "Meaning" is something I am able to derive from my experiences, and it is not something an LLM does or will ever be able to do (nor is training data even analogous to having experiences in any way shape or form.)
  - senordevnyc 19d ago
    Is "meaning" inherent to intelligence? Is emotion and the ability to have a subjective experience inherent to meaning? Genuine questions that I'm not sure we have good answers for yet. Your other point that humans need very few examples for learning vs. what LLMs need is an interesting one. A few researchers talked about this very thing on the most recent episode of Dwarkesh's podcast. My own view is that it seems unfair to compare an LLM's training with just what a human gets over the course of a lifetime, because our brains have been trained by a billion years of evolution for pattern matching. I'm not at all confident that AI models won't catch up.

bmau5 19d ago

Open to sharing what workflow you're using on the lifestyle image creation? I've tried the Higgsfield MCP, and direct Figma integrations - but keep running into hallucinations on product dimensions, etc.

idopmstuff 17d ago
At this point, I mostly ask Claude to use Claude in Chrome to use ChatGPT to create lifestyle images (because I am cheap and I don't want to pay for API usage when I could get them free) based on whatever product shots I have. Sometimes I give it some more specific direction about what I want, but usually for the first pass I just tell it to make 10 or 20 or whatever and see what it gives me. When it's done, it generates a web page with the images and a simple UI for feedback, then uses the feedback I give it to iterate. It has always been very good at styling things well (i.e. if I'm making infographic-style images, I give it an example of one and it's good at copying the style/fonts/colors/etc.), but I suspect I get better-than-average results in terms of the content just because it has built up so much context from doing this and taking my feedback across so many different brands and images. The product dimension thing really stopped being an issue for me with ChatGPT Images 2, and the new 2.5 is better. If you're running into trouble, there are some cases where Gemini is better, but they're rare. But I will say if you're prompting yourself and running into issues, you should get Claude/ChatGPT to help you write the prompt that goes to the image model. They're very good at it. A little more on my process here: https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-way-i-have-used-ai-to https://theautomatedoperator.substack.com/p/the-dumbest-way-...

gavinboston 19d ago

> I am in the process of attempting to have AI run my business. I'm actually making very good progress, but it's happening in pieces Very cool! What's been the hardest part? Have you successfully automated non-trivial communications? (for example with prospects, customers, vendors, partners, etc.) > maybe an agent starting a business from scratch would have a better time This describes the project I've been working on since last year, with agents in company roles, deciding on strategy, collaborating, and making progress (admittedly nonlinear). Some parts of the platform are stronger than others. So far the company agents have developed a company strategy and plans for executing it, launched a website and blog, and built and operate two products, one free and one paid. But I would be wary of using a third party like Pion as a platform for running a business. It's one thing to know that your prompts and responses will be used to train models in the future, by companies that have a huge sea of relatively unstructured data. But it's another to hand over to another company every aspect of your strategy and operations, available to that company in real time and structured in such a way it's quick and easy to understand what you're up to and where you are going. Especially if it's being offered for free and at scale. With a free offering, value creation will likely come from either customer data or from escalating prices once customers are locked in. And even if neither of those happen, you now have a huge single point of failure for your entire organization. Seems like there are lots of strategic risks in there for the users.

idopmstuff 17d ago
> Very cool! What's been the hardest part? Have you successfully automated non-trivial communications? (for example with prospects, customers, vendors, partners, etc.) Yeah, the most recent brand I acquired had enough customer contacts via FB/IG comments and messages, plus email, that I had Claude build out an application for me where it pulls those in as they come, drafts a response including any actions that need to be taken, and lets me edit or send. It takes any edits as feedback to refine its playbook, so its gotten pretty good now. Handles things like warranty claims (get picture of the damage plus order number, create replacement order, send email confirming replacement order) plus most common questions. Still entirely human in the loop, but I'm going to let it start handling common cases autonomously soon. On the topic of starting an autonomous agent-run business from scratch, I had Claude set up a bunch of websites that pull publicly available (but somewhat annoying to access) government data, display it in easy to read format and send weekly emails. It's now running on its own with a couple levels of management - first, it does a weekly review of Google Search Console/GA4 and updates or creates new content to try to improve things from an SEO perspective. Then second, once a day it tracks all of the problems that have arisen over the past day (usually issues pulling the data or issues with the prose the models write), corrects them, and then tries to improve the system to stop them from recurring. I'm not really keeping tracking of it at the moment - too much other stuff to do right now - but it's getting a trickle of subscribers and is slowly rising the SEO ranks, so for now I'm content to let it sit and see if it ever gets to the point of being monetizable.