The truth about AI agents running your business

You've seen the posts. Somebody on LinkedIn or X has AI running their whole business. "Oh man, the AI is doing this, the AI is doing that."

Let me tell you something. Ninety percent of the stuff you see on social media about people having AI do stuff for them is fake.

Now, I'm not here to tell you agents don't work. They do. I use them every single day. When I recorded this in May, I had several AI agents on Telegram that I could talk to from my phone, each with its own job. So this isn't a guy on the outside throwing rocks. This is the truth from somebody who's inside it.

Agents are real

The one I was excited about was Hermes Agent, from Nous Research. It's what people wanted OpenClaw to be.

With OpenClaw, it couldn't remember anything. You found yourself fixing its flaws longer than you spent getting work done. Hermes grows with you. As you work, it starts to remember what you're doing. It changed my whole working life.

So yes. Agents have real value. But they all share the same problem when it comes to running a business.

Truth one: an agent isn't built for your business

Out of the box, an agent is general. To make it run your business, it has to be programmed. You have to customize it to do exactly what you want, and that's a lot of work on the front end.

Think about it. Tell most people "take this box and put it on the shelf" and they'll do it after the first or second time. Tell an AI agent to do something and, buddy, you've got to set it up to do exactly that.

And here's how a lot of these AI companies get their money. The more tries you put in, the more tokens you spend, the more you hit your limit, and the more you pay.

Truth two: most people only know ChatGPT

You're in the bubble like I'm in the bubble. You think everybody knows about OpenClaw and Hermes and Claude and Gemini.

They don't. Most people still only know about ChatGPT. And the space is moving so fast that only certain people have time to learn it. If you're running a business, you probably aren't one of them. That's not a knock on you. You're busy running a business.

Truth three: AI won't replace you. It speeds you up

AI will never replace a human being. What it gives you is speed. It helps you work much faster, and a lot of the time more accurately. But you've got to be someone who already knows what you're doing.

Here's a real example. When I had my consulting site built, I already knew what I wanted it to look like and which flows it needed. When someone books a discovery call, it connects to a calendar service. I knew Calendly. I knew the call would be free, and I knew the exact questions a business should answer before we talked. If I didn't have that knowledge, I'd be starting from scratch, burning tries and tokens.

So if you're replacing people with AI on anything that involves real security or real money, that's an awful move. Don't replace the people. Give the people AI, so their know-how plus the speed and accuracy of AI gives you better outcomes.

Truth four: domain knowledge is the unlock

I worked with an owner who runs a commercial HVAC company. He works with banks, schools, apartment complexes. I don't know nothing about HVAC, and I'm not trying to run his HVAC company.

What I do know is how to set up a website, make sure you get paid, and keep you from coming home at night trying to figure out Claude and Codex. So I built his site and wired up his payments, and now when something comes up, he just sends a text: "Hey, can you take care of this?" He runs his business. The AI side gets handled.

Truth five: you need a destination, not a tool

If you don't know where you're going, AI just gets you lost a lot faster.

A lot of people buy these tools and make cool things that make them no money. So ask yourself: are you in business, or are you buying a toy?

If you're a plumber, you need a website, a way to get paid, and a way to advertise. That's it. That's the destination. Then the question is whether you have time to learn how to do that, or you need help doing it while you learn on the side.

And once that speed comes, ideas come with it. That plumber might say, "Why don't I start making websites for other plumbers?" Now he has room to learn AI freely.

Truth six: the real money is in knowing how to use it

One of my very first customers came to me and said, "Richard, I don't want your product. Can you set up my Claude so it can become a stock trading bot for me?" I set it up. That one setup paid me more than anybody had ever paid for one of my products.

People were telling me, "We like your product, but we need you." I wasn't listening. When I finally did, the meetings started coming in.

And mind you, it may be that Claude is better for you. It may be Codex. That don't hurt my feelings anymore. The right tool is whatever gets your business where it's going.

What this means for you

Agents are fire. But an agent with no destination and nobody who knows how to point it is just a faster way to get lost. That's the thinking behind the RMDW Program: a mentor every week and your AI put to work with you, so your know-how leads and the AI brings the speed.