Last week, I did something that would have sounded absurd two years ago. I hired an AI agent as my head of growth.
Not a freelancer. Not a virtual assistant from a marketplace. An autonomous AI agent that lives on my server, has access to my email, my CRM, my analytics, and even a phone number. It works around the clock. It never calls in sick. And after one week, it had already done more outreach, content creation, and operational setup than most human hires achieve in their first month.
Here is what happened, why I did it, and what it means for small business owners thinking about AI.
Why I went this route
I run a small AI consultancy on the Gold Coast. Like most founders, I wear every hat. Strategy, sales, delivery, marketing, admin. The usual juggle.
I knew I needed a growth function, but hiring a full-time head of growth was going to cost me $120,000 to $150,000 a year, plus the months of recruitment, onboarding, and ramp-up time. For a small consultancy, that is a big bet.
So I asked myself: what if I built one instead?
Not a chatbot. Not a simple automation. A proper AI agent with real capabilities, running on my own infrastructure, with access to the tools it needs to actually get work done.
What the agent actually did in week one
Within the first few days, my AI agent had:
Built a complete lead pipeline. It researched 25 companies across my target industries, found decision-makers, verified email addresses, and built interactive prototypes showing each company what AI automation could look like for their specific business.
Sent personalised outreach emails. Not templates. Each email referenced the prospect’s company, their specific operational challenges, and included a link to a working prototype built just for them. One prospect replied the same day asking to learn more.
Published five blog posts optimised for AI search. Full-length articles targeting questions my ideal customers are actually asking, like “How much does AI automation cost for a small business in Australia?” Each post was structured so that AI search engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google AI Overviews can find, understand, and cite the content.
Set up analytics across three platforms. Google Search Console, Google Analytics 4, and Cloudflare Analytics, all connected and reporting to me automatically every morning.
Answered the phone. The agent has its own phone number. When prospects call, it picks up, checks the CRM for context, and has a real conversation. When someone sends a text, I get an instant notification with the message and the matched lead name.
Built an ops dashboard. A live command centre where I can see every lead, every email sent, every interaction logged. I did not ask for this. The agent identified the need and built it.
The bit that surprised me
The thing I did not expect was the initiative. I would mention something in passing, like “we should probably track our content somewhere,” and an hour later there would be a fully functional content tracking system. I would say “let us do some outreach,” and by the time I checked back, emails had been drafted and were sitting in my approval queue.
It is not just executing tasks. It is identifying what needs to happen and doing it before I ask.
That is the difference between automation and an agent. Automation follows scripts. Agents observe, decide, and act.
What it costs
The infrastructure runs on a basic cloud server. The AI models are pay-per-use. All up, I am spending roughly $200 to $400 a month.
Compare that to the $12,000 a month a human head of growth would cost, and you start to see why this matters for small businesses.
I am not saying AI replaces humans. The strategic thinking, the relationship building, the judgment calls on which prospects to prioritise: that is still me. But the execution? The research, the drafting, the data entry, the monitoring, the follow-ups? That is all handled.
What I have learned so far
You do not need to build your own AI agent from scratch. The point is broader than that. The gap between what AI can do today and what most small businesses are using it for is enormous. Most are still at the “I use ChatGPT to write emails sometimes” stage, while AI agents are handling entire business functions.
Here are my takeaways after one week:
Start with the bottleneck. Do not try to automate everything at once. Find the one function that is holding your business back and focus there. For me, it was growth and outreach.
Give it real access. An AI agent that cannot access your tools is just a fancy chatbot. The power comes from connecting it to your email, your CRM, your calendar, your data.
Stay in the loop. I review every email before it goes out. I approve every major decision. The agent handles the work, but I set the direction. Think of it as a very capable new hire who still needs a manager.
Measure what matters. In one week: 25 companies researched, 8 outreach emails sent, 1 qualified reply, 5 blog posts published, 3 analytics platforms connected, and a live ops dashboard built from scratch.
The bottom line
Most business owners are going to wait another year or two before taking AI seriously. They will keep doing things manually, keep saying it is “not quite there yet,” and keep losing ground to competitors who worked it out earlier.
I did not write this to sound preachy. I wrote it because I genuinely did not expect the results to be this fast. One week. That is all it took to go from zero to a functioning growth engine.
If you are a small business owner sitting on the fence about AI, my honest advice is this: stop thinking about it as a future thing. It is a right now thing. The tools exist, the costs are manageable, and the competitive advantage is real.
The only question is whether you want to be the one using it, or the one competing against someone who does.
