Small Business Owner Runs Sales on 7 AI Agents: Tools Are 10%, Agent-Readiness Is 90%
AdeptNeighborhood69 · reddit · 2026-10-31
Reddit user Zach shares a year of moving most sales and ops at a small industrial parts business onto 7 AI agents. Key takeaway: the tool itself is 10% of the work; making it agent-ready is the other 90%.
- Building is fast: a coding agent can produce a lead tracker or quoting sheet in an afternoon.
- The hard part is the plumbing around each tool:
- Agent interface: every tool needs an API or MCP server — screens and forms are useless to agents;
- Hosting: each tool needs somewhere to run, a database, and deploys;
- Auth (the worst part): OAuth for every outside service plus per-agent keys and permission boundaries;
- Human view: seeing what each agent did and why, and leaving notes, without opening every tool.
- He rebuilt the same plumbing for every tool, and asks the community how they expose agent tools (MCP vs CLI vs direct DB), handle per-agent permissions, and structure agent tooling.
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