My AI agents found $500K we were wasting

While everyone's arguing about whether AI can write a decent blog post, we pointed ours at our expense reports.

It found $500K/year in duplicate tools, forgotten subscriptions, and vendor overlap nobody on the team had caught. The "AI writes content" conversation is the wrong conversation.

Here's what happened.

We built one brain for the entire company

Companies like Block and Ramp call it "world intelligence." One unified brain for the whole organization. We built ours and call it Single Brain.

CRM, analytics, team chats, docs, ops data, all connected. Anyone on the team asks questions in plain English and gets real answers from our data. Not generic advice.

On top of that brain we deployed a fleet of agents. For example, Flash handles content. One piece it made got 354,000 views and put multi-billion dollar companies in our inbox. Each agent feeds back into the brain. The brain gets smarter with every interaction.

Then our ops agent ran a quarterly vendor audit. Nobody asked it to. Here's what it flagged:

• 12 unused CRM seats: $43K/year

• 3 SEO tools doing the same job: $18K/year

• Underperforming ad campaigns our team hadn't gotten around to killing: $438K/year

Total: $500K in annual savings. Three days later, I cut those costs.

Then it offered to draft the cancellation emails.

That's the moment the whole thing clicked for me. Not the savings. The initiative.

A different agent found that free users who connect analytics within 48 hours convert at 34%. Users who don't? 6%.

That's not a report. That's a lever you can pull today.

Here's where most people get it wrong

They go fully autonomous on day one. That's how you get hallucinations and broken workflows.

Month one is rough. Things break. You reset models. You restart.

Month two, patterns emerge. Agents get reused. The system works with you instead of against you.

Month three, the flywheel kicks in. It finds 10x opportunities across sales, infrastructure, and content because it's finally learned how your business actually works.

The key? Fat skills, thin harnesses. Your skills need to be deep. Detailed SOPs and playbooks for how your best people actually work. The harness, your driver like Claude Code, stays thin. The intelligence lives in the knowledge, not the tooling.

Record how your best people do things. Turn it into playbooks. The more you document, the stronger the system gets.

That's what compounds.

Three months in

My team rates this system 9 out of 10. Interns onboard themselves using it. People on my team say they can't work without it.

Build the memory first. Deploy agents on top. The intelligence compounds, but only if you feed it something worth compounding.

Want the full playbook? The exact prompts, the workflow, the models we use? I walk through everything in this video: https://youtu.be/GkyaVQnIIbQ

To building machines that pay for themselves,

Eric Siu

P.S.

1 - If you want help building AI agents that actually know your business, my team is doing this with Single Brain. It runs your revenue operations 24/7 and gets smarter every week, learn more here.
2 - If you want to grow faster using the power of AI, my agency Single Grain is offering free marketing plans to qualified Leveling Up newsletter subscribers, check it out here.
3 - We’re hiring AI-forward performance ad creative strategists, AI-forward SEOs and paid media people, AI short form creators, AI automation interns, and more. If you’re interested, apply at our Careers page.
4 - We launched ClickFlow to help automate and scale SEO.
5 - Interested in creating 1:1 personalized LinkedIn ads in minutes instead of weeks? Sign up for the Karrot.ai waitlist.
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