Blog · By Rea Hailley, CEO and Co-Founder

AI Agents for Business: What Two Real Builds Taught Me

Meeting nine or more people a day made it nearly impossible for me to remember each one, what they do, and what we talked about. That problem is why I use an AI agent every working day, and why I can tell you what AI agents for business actually look like from the inside.

I co-founded New Idea Machine, a Calgary custom software and AI company. This is not a think piece about what AI might do someday. These are two agents we built: one that runs my working life, and one we are building for a nonprofit. Real problems, real hardware, real lessons.

What is an AI agent, in plain language?

Most business owners I talk to think an AI agent is something like putting a prompt into ChatGPT, or a chatbox on a website. It is more than that. An AI agent is software that does a job for you: it watches or listens, makes sense of what it takes in, and then acts, updating your systems, completing steps, and telling you what needs your attention. You approve the important parts. It does the rest.

What does an AI agent actually do all day?

Some days I have nine or more meetings back to back. I had note-taking software, but I never had time to go back, pull out what mattered, enter it into our CRM, and remember every follow-up. Everything was falling through the cracks.

So I gave my co-founder Al a challenge: build me something that mimics an assistant running around behind me, writing down literally everything I say and everything that someone says to me. He built Hermes Ear, a small device that sits on my desk and listens to my meetings.

Before a meeting starts, I tap a button on Telegram. When it ends, I tap stop. About a minute later the meeting is transcribed. A few minutes after that, I get a summary with every contact and task the agent extracted. Nothing goes into our CRM until a human approves it: I can accept, edit, or discard what it found. Then a custom email arrives every day listing my outstanding tasks, and each one stays on that list until I check it off.

I do not go into my CRM anymore, which is amazing, because I never had time to do it anyway. Hermes is my second brain. The first week it worked, I felt a huge weight lift. I thought: I've got this. I can now do this.

Do AI agents need the cloud?

Hermes Ear runs entirely on our own hardware. Meeting audio never leaves our network, and our cloud AI bill for it is zero dollars.

That matters more than most people realize. If your business handles sensitive conversations, client files, health information, or legal matters, you do not want recordings of your meetings travelling through someone else's servers. An agent can live on a device in your office instead. We are building exactly that for a Calgary law firm whose owner will not use anything cloud-connected, and he is right not to.

How do you keep an AI agent from making things up?

You control what goes in. We are building an AI agent for a nonprofit that supports other Alberta nonprofits. Their challenge: a mandate to serve a growing community with a very small staff and tools that were truly a spreadsheet. Everything was manual.

The agent we designed is an AI concierge. Anyone in their community can ask it for help, and it answers in simple grade-eight language, so newcomers where English is a second language can use it too. If it detects a mental health emergency, it surfaces crisis support resources right there and then.

Here is the part that prevents hallucination: the agent is deliberately contained. It cannot browse the internet. It can only surface information it has been fed, and every piece of that information is verified by a human first. We even set a standing rule: if an organization does not update its information twice a year, the agent stops surfacing that organization. Stale directories are how AI tools end up confidently wrong. Ours cannot be, because the nonprofit has complete control over what it knows. The data stays on Canadian soil, and in this first phase the system stores no identifying information about the people who use it.

Can an AI agent serve people at 3 AM?

The old way of thinking says: we need more manpower. But people get sick, go on vacation, and leave. Help tied to office hours is not help at 3 AM or on a weekend, and that is when people often need it. The concierge is available around the clock and can handle an almost unlimited number of questions at once, while the model and the data stay on hardware the organization controls. A bottleneck their staff could never out-hire simply stops being a bottleneck.

What does an AI agent cost?

It varies with what the agent needs to do and how much data is involved. Our AI agent projects start at $10,000. Mine pays for itself in the hours it hands back every single week, and in the follow-ups that no longer slip.

Where do you start?

Not with the technology. When a business owner calls us, I start with one question: what is the problem you are having? From there we can recommend potential solutions, and you decide whether one of them is the right fit for your business.

If you have a bottleneck you cannot see past, book a call. No pressure, just great advice.

Rea Hailley is the co-founder of New Idea Machine, a Calgary custom software and AI company that builds apps, automations, and AI agents that business owners own outright.