WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
What Can AI Agents Do for Your Business?
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Americans spend 60% more time on the phone with customer service than they did twenty years ago. My AI agent now handles that for me.
It was Labor Day, and the internet at our lake house kept cutting out.
I figured we were stuck until Tuesday. Who gets a service technician out on a holiday? But I asked Grok Bot to try anyway. Grok Bot is an AI agent that works on its own computer. It went to the Xfinity website, worked its way through the support bot, and booked a technician. He showed up that same morning.
I was a little giddy. So I pushed my luck.
The week before, a door-to-door salesman from AT&T had asked if I’d switch to their fiber service at our home in Franklin. I was tempted. But switching is a hassle, so I told him I’d check with Xfinity first.
Now I had someone to do the checking. Grok Bot asked Xfinity whether fiber was available in our neighborhood. It wasn’t.
So I gave it a new assignment: Negotiate with Xfinity and get me a financial incentive to stay rather than move to AT&T.
Grok Bot went back to the support bot and started bargaining. I didn’t type a word.
When it finished, our bill had dropped from $144 a month to $85.
That’s when it hit me. If an AI agent could get a technician to my door on a holiday and cut my bill by $59 a month, what else was I still doing myself that I didn’t need to?
Most business owners I talk to still use AI mainly to think and write. It drafts and summarizes. Helpful, but they’re still the ones making the calls and clicking the buttons.
An AI agent works differently. It has its own computer. It can open a browser, click through a website, fill out a form, and carry on a conversation with a support bot while you do something else entirely.
So what can AI agents do for your business? More than you think. You can find out by giving one three kinds of assignments, each a little bolder than the last.
Assignment #1: Schedule It
Start where the stakes are lowest. Scheduling costs you nothing but time, and a mistake is easy to fix.
That’s why the Labor Day technician made the perfect first test. If it had failed, I would have lost nothing but a little time.
Since then, Grok Bot has booked dinner reservations for me twice. I told it what I wanted, and it came back with a confirmation. I never had to step in.
This matters more than it sounds. The time Americans spend on the phone with customer service has climbed 60% over the last twenty years.1 I suspect a good chunk of that is the scheduling dance: finding an open slot, waiting on hold, and repeating your address to a third person.
Think about the calendar work that still lands on you or your assistant. Vendor site visits. Service calls for the office. The appointment you keep pushing to next month. Pick one and hand it to an agent this week.
Assignment #2: Order It
Once scheduling works, raise the stakes a notch. Ordering means the agent works inside your accounts and moves toward spending your money.
Twice now, Grok Bot has logged into my doctor’s patient portal and requested a prescription refill. If you’ve ever hunted for the right menu in one of those portals, you know why that felt like a gift. Nearly 80% of Americans report frustration with the paperwork and coordination around insurance and medical appointments.2
Then I asked it to place a sizable supplement order. It found every item, filled the cart, and went all the way to checkout. Then it stopped and waited while I typed in my payment information myself, on its computer.
That pause is the rule I’d give you for every assignment at this level. The agent does the work, but you keep the keys and the wallet. You log in when a password is required, and you enter the card yourself.
McKinsey’s researchers see the same pattern in how people are adopting AI shopping agents. Consumers delegate when the automation is reliable and reversible, and they hand over more as they watch an agent perform reliably.3 Trust gets built one order at a time.
In your business, this is office supplies and the reorder emails that eat half of someone’s afternoon.
Assignment #3: Negotiate It
This is the one that makes people lean in. At this level, the agent speaks for you to another company.
After the technician showed up, I told Grok Bot about the AT&T offer and asked it to find me a reason to stay. It bargained with Xfinity’s support bot until our bill dropped from $144 a month to $85, locked in for five years.
My colleague Matt Ragland heard that story and tried it himself on NFL Sunday Ticket. The promotional price was $240 a year, but only for new customers. Matt logged in to his Google account, and Grok Bot took it from there. It worked through the YouTube TV support bot, asked to speak to a human, and got Matt the new-customer rate. He saved $150 and spent none of his own time doing it.
Neither of us discovered a secret. Consumer Reports found that nearly 70% of people who tried to haggle with their telecom provider got a discount or some other benefit.4 Most of us never ask, because asking takes an hour we don’t have. An agent has the hour.
For your business, the targets are bigger: phone and internet contracts, merchant processing fees, insurance renewals, and the software you’ve auto-renewed for years. Give the agent true facts to work with, like a real competitor quote or how long you’ve been a customer. Give it a walk-away number. And never let it bluff.
Your First Assignment
None of the AI agent examples in this article required an engineer or a line of code. AI agents for business are ready to go to work for you now. You can test one this week. Have it schedule something. Then have it order something, while you keep the keys and the wallet. Once it earns your trust, have it negotiate something. Each assignment builds the confidence you need for the next one.
A few weeks ago, I wrote about giving your AI agents clear roles, the way you would a team. This month showed me what that team can do when you hand it real assignments. And lately I’ve started talking to Grok Bot in its live voice mode, telling it what I need the way I’d tell a trusted assistant. Jarvis isn’t science fiction anymore. It’s almost here.
Imagine finishing next week with a stack of errands you never touched: the service call booked, the supplies reordered, the contract renegotiated. Now imagine what you’d do with those hours.
What’s the first assignment you’ll hand to an AI agent?
Comments
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REFERENCE
- Catherina Gioino, “Welcome to the ‘Annoyance Economy’: Americans Are Paying over $165 Billion a Year as Companies Waste Their Time to Drive Revenue,” Fortune, February 19, 2026. ↩︎
- Gioino, “Welcome to the ‘Annoyance Economy.’” ↩︎
- Deepa Mahajan, Hannah Mayer, Katharina Schumacher, and Roger Roberts, “The Automation Curve in Agentic Commerce,” McKinsey & Company, January 28, 2026. ↩︎
- “Telecom Service Buying Guide,” Consumer Reports, updated February 3, 2023. ↩︎
