Run 27 back-office AI agents with strict approval guardrails
Lake Stevens Pete (owner of an HVAC company and other businesses)
What they did with AI
An owner of several small businesses, including an HVAC company, counted 27 active AI agents and 36 routines (26 on a schedule) in use across his companies. They pull statements, file invoices, update sales and cost sheets, flag overdue maintenance and track renewal dates. His rules: only three emails ever send on their own, everything else is a draft he approves, and nothing posts publicly or pays a bill without his yes. He keeps an inventory of all agents, which caught a failed reminder and two routines doing the same job.
Related use cases
Compare submittals against specs with an AI agent
Haskell
On its own Jacksonville HQ renovation, design-builder Haskell posted QR codes around the jobsite so workers and trade partners could ask an AI agent about specs, submittals and drawings and get answers with links to the source documents. Assistant PMs also use a templated agent that compares a trade partner's submittal to the spec and lays out variances in a side-by-side table. Haskell estimates it saves about 10 minutes per field question and more than an hour per submittal review.
Automate cost-plus draw billing and receipt capture
Sustainable 9 Design + Build
Minneapolis custom builder Sustainable 9 runs open-book, cost-plus projects up to $6M+ and used to build every draw in a giant spreadsheet. It now pulls costs automatically from bank feeds, vendor emails and field receipt photos into an AI construction-accounting tool, codes each one to job and cost code with approvals, and generates client-ready draw packages. The builder reports billing went from 80+ hours a month to about 2 hours per cycle and that it recovered thousands in receipts that used to go unbilled.
Give plumbers ChatGPT on a tablet for proposals, invoices and troubleshooting
Oak Creek Plumbing & Remodeling
The roughly 20 plumbers at Oak Creek Plumbing & Remodeling near Milwaukee carry tablets with ChatGPT. They photograph a broken water heater or type up what they see, and use it to draft work proposals and invoices and to brainstorm fixes for tricky problems. President Dan Callies told CNN that even older techs have learned to ask it the right questions and that it has helped the company "lower our overhead and provide better services or better value."