There is a strange thing happening with AI at the moment.

Millions of business owners are using ChatGPT, Claude and other AI tools. They’re asking them to write emails, create social media posts, summarise documents and answer questions.

And that’s useful.

But it’s also only scratching the surface.

I used AI this way myself for three or four years. I was comfortable with it and probably more advanced than many business owners using it.

Then I started learning more about coding and, more importantly, I installed an AI agent into my own business.

That was the moment it clicked.

I realised I didn’t just have to ask AI to create something for me. I could actually ask AI to do things for me.

And that is a very different proposition.

From talking to AI to delegating to AI

For most people, using AI still looks something like this:

“Write this email for me.”

“Summarise this document.”

“Give me some ideas for my next blog post.”

That is essentially using AI as a very clever assistant that sits beside you.

Agentic AI takes that a step further.

Instead of just giving you an answer, an AI agent can be connected to the systems your business already uses and instructed to carry out work.

In my business, I use an AI agent called Viktor, which sits inside Slack.

Instead of opening five different programs, finding information, moving files around and trying to remember what I need to follow up, I can simply give Viktor an instruction.

The agent can then go and do the work.

That shift has completely changed the way I think about AI.

Think of it as an admin person inside your business

One of the easiest ways I explain this to business owners is not to think about “AI” at all.

Think about the repetitive administrative work happening inside your business every day.

Things like:

• Setting up and onboarding new clients
• Creating project folders
• Monitoring emails
• Producing your daily task list
• Checking whether projects are running on schedule
• Scheduling tasks
• Transcribing meetings or recordings
• Turning those recordings into scopes of work or fee proposals
• Drafting emails
• Preparing draft invoices
• Monitoring unpaid invoices
• Following up payments
• Building dashboards
• Monitoring important business numbers

None of these jobs individually sounds enormous.

But put them together across a week, a month and a year, and they consume an extraordinary amount of time.

Often they’re being done by the business owner or by senior employees whose time should probably be spent somewhere else.

That is where I think agentic AI becomes particularly interesting.

Here’s a simple example

Imagine you win a new project.

Previously:

• The business owner might create part of the project structure.
• Someone else might create folders.
• Another employee might notify the team.
• Someone would need to download documents from emails and remember where to save them.

Then, as emails arrived during the project, different team members might file things in different places, or not file them at all.

Everyone is doing their best, but there is never complete certainty about who is responsible for what.

Now imagine giving one instruction:

“Set up the new project.”

An AI agent could create the required project folders, notify the team members involved and begin monitoring emails relating to that project.

When attachments arrive, it can identify them and place them in the correct project folders. It can also handle tasks such as setting up a CRM, entering client details into accounting software, creating a brand document, finding an ABN, and researching the client to populate the CRM.

As the project continues, it can keep monitoring incoming information and help maintain the system.

The significant change isn’t that each individual task suddenly became impossible for a human to do.

Most businesses don’t know what they don’t know

One of the biggest challenges I see is that business owners simply don’t know what is possible yet.

And why would they?

Most people’s experience of AI has been opening ChatGPT and typing something into a box.

So naturally they think AI is something you ask questions.

They don’t necessarily realise it can:

• Monitor something
• Update something
• Create something in another system
• Follow up on something
• Recognise that an event has occurred and start another process automatically

That is why I don’t believe every business owner needs to become an AI expert.

You don’t need to understand how your accounting software is programmed in order to use it to create invoices. You don’t need to understand how your server works to have a website. And you don’t need to become an expert in AI agents to benefit from agentic AI.

What you do need is someone who understands your business well enough to install it properly.

Start with the business problem, not the AI

This is also why I don’t start these conversations by talking about software.

I start with a discovery session.

We sit down together and look at what actually happens inside the business:

• Where are people spending time?
• What jobs are repetitive?
• What keeps being forgotten?
• What requires someone to manually move information from one place to another?
• Where is the business owner still doing things at 8 o’clock at night that really shouldn’t require the business owner?
• Where are highly paid team members spending time doing low-value administration?

We record that session and start identifying opportunities.

Then we build a plan.

Sometimes the best solution may be an AI agent. Sometimes it may be automation. Sometimes it may simply be fixing a process that isn’t working particularly well.

AI shouldn’t run everything

I’m also not suggesting handing an entire business over to an AI agent.

There are areas where I strongly believe humans should remain in control.

I don’t believe an AI admin agent should generally be having client conversations on your behalf.

Your clients have a relationship with you and your people. That human connection still matters.

I also believe high-level strategy belongs with humans.

Can AI help you explore an idea? Absolutely.

Can you bounce ideas around with it, conduct research and use it to challenge your thinking? Of course.

But creativity, business judgment, relationships and high-level strategic decisions are still areas where I want the human firmly in the driver’s seat.

The agent should remove the administrative weight surrounding those activities. It shouldn’t replace the thinking.

What changed when I installed an agent in my own business

The biggest difference for me was incredibly simple.

I stopped doing as many things myself.

Instead, I started instructing.

That distinction sounds small until you experience it.

Something that might have required me to open a system, find some information, complete a task, document it and remember what happened could instead become an instruction.

And the agent was fast.

• It remembered what had happened previously.
• It could follow processes consistently.
• Sometimes it would even suggest a better way of approaching something.

The result was not simply that AI was faster than me.

It was that I got my own time back.

And for a business owner, time is often the resource in shortest supply.

The opportunity isn’t just to become more productive

There is an obvious business case here.

If you take repetitive administration away from a business owner or highly skilled employee, that person can spend more time doing the things that actually grow the business.

• More sales
• More conversations with customers
• More relationship building
• More strategy
• More valuable work

Businesses that use agentic AI well over the next few years will have the opportunity to increase their capacity without increasing administration at the same rate.

But I think there is another benefit that is just as important.

You don’t have to fill every minute you save with more work.

Maybe your AI agent gives you five hours back each week.

You could use those five hours to grow your business.

Or perhaps some of those hours mean you don’t work every evening.

Maybe you stop opening your laptop on Saturday morning.

Maybe you get to have dinner with your family without mentally running through everything you forgot to do that day.

Maybe your senior team members stop feeling as though they’re permanently drowning in administration.

For many business owners, success shouldn’t just mean building a bigger business. It should also mean building a business that gives you a better life.

You don’t need to understand AI. You need to understand your business.

I think this is where the next stage of AI adoption becomes very different.

Business owners are not all going to become AI developers.

And they shouldn’t have to.

The important question isn’t:

“How much do I know about AI?”

A much better question is:

“What am I still doing manually in my business that I shouldn’t need to do anymore?”

Start there.

Find the repetitive work, the administration, and the things currently being held together by someone’s memory, along with the jobs that pull your best people away from the work they’re actually good at, and then work out which of those tasks an AI agent can take off your plate.

You don’t need to know how to build the agent.

You need someone who knows how to install it around the way your business actually operates.

Because ultimately, agentic AI isn’t really about AI.