We've Got AI Agents in Production

Last night I connected Norwich Executive Travel to Secret HQ, our not-very-secret AI side of Digital HQ. As of this morning, an AI agent is doing real work for a real business.

That's a big deal for us. So I'm writing a post about it.

What it does

Julian runs Norwich Executive Travel. A lot of his bookings still arrive by email: a customer writes in with a date, a time, a pick-up address and an airport, and someone has to turn that into a booking in the system.

That someone was Julian. Every job meant reading the email, finding the customer, typing in the addresses, getting a quote and saving it. He did it day after day, and he hated it.

Now he copies the email, pastes it into Secret HQ, and the agent does the rest:

The agent reads the email and works out who the customer is, where they're going and when. Then it uses the same tools the booking system already has, like finding the customer and getting a quote, to fill in a booking. It saves the booking as a draft.

Julian stays in charge

The draft is the important part.

The agent can't confirm a booking, send a driver or charge anybody. It can only prepare the booking. Julian looks at the draft, checks it, and approves it himself. If the agent misread something, he fixes it before it matters.

This is the guardrails idea from our post on how agents work, used on a real job. The agent does the slow part and the person makes the decision. Julian keeps control of his business and stops doing the job he hated.

Why paste first?

Pasting is a stepping stone. The real goal is for the agent to read the bookings inbox itself, so the draft is already waiting when Julian sits down with his coffee.

Connecting to an inbox properly takes time to get right: permissions, deciding which emails count as bookings, and dealing with replies and forwards. We didn't want Julian to keep typing in jobs while we built that. So we shipped the paste version first. It uses the same agent and the same draft-and-approve step. Only the way the email gets in is different.

Julian gets most of the benefit today. When the inbox connection is ready, it will replace the paste step and nothing else about the process changes.

We've only scratched the surface

This is the part that excites me most. Nothing in the booking agent is specific to bookings. It's the same loop as any other agent: read something, use some tools, prepare a result, and let a person approve it. To give it a new job, you mostly give it a new set of tools.

A few jobs we're already thinking about:

• Quote follow-ups. Someone saved a quote last week and never booked. The agent drafts a friendly nudge.
• Chasing invoices. It spots what's overdue and drafts the reminder, so nobody has to have that awkward conversation from scratch.
• Customer replies. "What time is my driver coming?" The agent can look that up and write the reply.
• Weekly reports. Jobs done, quotes won, busy days coming up, written in plain English instead of a spreadsheet.

Every one of these works the same way as the booking agent. The agent prepares the work and a person approves it.

Small, but significant

One agent turning emails into bookings for one business won't change the world. But it's real work for a real customer, and he's already happier for it. Until last night, agents were something we wrote about and built demos of. Now one is in production.

Next up is the inbox. After that, we'll see where it takes us.

If you've got a job you hate doing that starts with "someone has to read this and type it into that", get in touch. That's what we're building agents for.