This Week's Updates - October 9th and What I Learned This Summer

Since stepping down from Narmi in May, I have been building various projects with AI coding agents, including Skills and Agents Co. I've spent the summer with operations and finance teams, getting them started with skills and finding which of their business processes can be automated or augmented with AI. Two examples: a skill that automates the AP process, and an agent that runs a monthly business report.

Here are some of the learnings

• Skills and agents will change how the work gets done. Moving an organization to AI is step 1. Step 1b is reskilling the people who do the work, so they still have meaningful work.
• Not every step needs AI. With AI coding agents, you can turn the steps that should give the same answer every time into code. The agent then calls those tools and MCPs for the fixed parts, and uses AI only where judgment is needed. That is more reliable and uses fewer tokens. One monthly report run we reviewed used about 300k tokens per deck just to write the commentary, and the whole run took about two hours.
• The fun part has been demystifying AI: showing people what it is good for and where it is not ideal. Give them the training, the human skills, and the agent skills first, then see what can be productized over time.

My conclusion is that there is an opportunity for an AI-native business process platform that lets busy workers use AI to drive value and outcomes without being further burdened (i.e. pressing enter all day).

What shipped this week

• You can share an agent with a named person outside your organization.
• The skill suggestion on a workflow map now gives its reasons in plain sentences, and you can discard it.
• We improved the install experience for skills.

The full list is on skillsandagents.co.

If you or anyone you know is building or exploring in the business process automation space, or is having trouble automating business processes with skills and agents and wants to chat, reach out to me.

What I'm Reading This Week

The Art of Happiness by Epicurus

The Empty Suit Executive

Automating eval design and hillclimbing with Claude