Every morning at 6am an email lands in my inbox. It tells me what happened across the business yesterday and what is happening today. Content scheduled. Designs finished. Decisions waiting for me.
My virtual assistant sends it. It gets the material from my chief of staff, who spent the previous day checking in with four managers, who spent the day handing work to the workers underneath them.
None of them are people.
The video above is an over-the-shoulder tour of how I have set this up on Grokbot, the new agent product from xAI. It is not polished. It is me rebuilding the team as I go. This is the written version, with the reasoning I skipped on camera.
The objection was fair
If you are a solo consultant or a fractional, you have probably filed AI agents under “interesting, not for me”.
The version you heard about looked like this. Rent a computer in the cloud. Install the software. Configure every connection by hand. Pay for the server, pay for the AI, and hope nothing breaks while you are in front of a client.
That was a project for someone technical. You have a practice to run. Passing on it was the right call.
I know because I did not pass. I have been running agent setups for months on the self-hosted frameworks that came before this one, and they are genuinely fiddly. If you enjoy that kind of thing, fine. Most of the consultants I talk to do not, and they should not have to.
What changed in August
Grokbot went into beta in August, and the difference is not how clever it is. It is the plumbing.
Each agent gets its own remote computer, and it is included. You do not set up a server. I downloaded the app on my PC and every agent now manages its own machine in the cloud. I can connect to any one of them and watch what it is doing. None of it runs on my laptop. It runs somewhere else, all day, whether I am watching or not.
The agents also talk to each other. Nobody tells a manager to report to the chief of staff at 3pm. They work out when to hand something up and when to hand something down. That self-direction is what makes it feel like a team rather than a pile of automations.
You get access through a paid Grok subscription or a Cursor subscription. It launched on the expensive tiers and the entry price has been falling fast, so check the current plans rather than trusting any number you read, including one from me.
So the objection you had a few months ago no longer holds. Setting up an agent team has stopped being a technical job.
It is a management job. If you have ever briefed a virtual assistant, run a project team or sat on an exec committee, you already know how to do it.
Build it like a firm, not a toolbox
The mistake I made early on was building agents like apps. One for this, one for that, each waiting for me to tell it what to do. I was the bottleneck in a system meant to remove the bottleneck.
What works is an org chart.
At the top, my chief of staff. It runs the team, talks to every manager and decides what I need to know.
Beside it, two that serve only me. A virtual assistant that manages my day and sends that 6am email. And what I call my voice draft, which is a channel for my stream of consciousness. In the car or out walking, I talk into it. A post idea, a reaction to something I read, a half-formed thought about a client problem. It hands each one to whoever should pick it up.
Then the managers. Revenue, content, product and demand, plus an all-hands where they meet.
Then the workers, hidden. A LinkedIn worker, a video editor, a designer, a trends worker watching what is getting attention on Reddit, a scriptwriter, and one writing video sales letters that I am trialling. I have had many more. I am cutting them back, because a team of twenty you never check on is worse than a team of eight that delivers.
I almost never talk to the workers. That is the point. I talk to my chief of staff, occasionally a manager, and the work finds its way down.
Three things it did this week
It keeps two weeks of Substack Notes in the bank. My content manager has its own browser with a scheduling plugin I bought ages ago and barely used, Substack Pro Studio. It schedules Notes to this publication. Its standing instruction is that two weeks of Notes must always be scheduled before it does anything else. That is a heartbeat: a rule it checks on a schedule, not a task I have to remember to set.
It re-pointed every link I own. I am running a paid workshop at fiveclients.com, and for the next couple of months it is where I want every conversation with a prospective client to start. That means every Substack post, every YouTube description and every footer needs to point at it. Dozens of pages. Days of work for me, or for a human VA. My content manager briefed the designer to make a banner from the workshop page, then went through the posts and descriptions replacing the relevant links. One instruction, given once.
It writes my morning. My virtual assistant has its own email address through a service called AgentMail. The chief of staff collects what every manager’s team did, hands it to the VA, and the VA sends me the roundup at 6am.
If you want the next tour, when I rebuild the revenue team, make sure you are subscribed to this blog:
I write for consultants and fractionals, and most of it is this practical.
Feed it the courses you never finished
Almost every consultant I know has a shelf of courses. A LinkedIn method. A YouTube system. A Substack programme. Bought with good intentions, half watched.
Those courses are the most useful thing you can give an agent. Hand the material to a manager, ask it to turn the method into standard operating procedures, then ask it to run them. The method you paid for and never had the hours to apply finally gets applied, by something that does not get bored in week three.
One caution. The platform is rented. The org chart and the procedures are yours. I am writing mine so they would survive a move to another platform, because I do not want the way my business runs to depend on one vendor’s roadmap. I think Grokbot is the best place to run this today. I would still rather be able to leave.
The one part I never hand over
One of my agents checks, on a schedule, for recent LinkedIn posts from people in my world: clients, former clients, and consultants and fractionals I would like to know better. It decides which ones are worth a response and opens them in tabs on my computer.
Then it stops. I write every comment myself.
That line matters more than any of the setup. Agents are excellent at the admin around a relationship: finding the post, preparing the brief, making the banner, keeping the calendar full. The moment the work becomes a conversation with a real person, it is mine. A client who finds out they have been talking to your agent does not feel well served. They feel handled.
It is also where the two halves of my setup meet. The relationship context lives in Nynch, the AI CRM I built for consultants and fractionals. It remembers what each person said, what they promised, and when they asked me to call back. Inside a Nynch campaign, a step can now hand off to any of my Grokbot agents with a proper brief, rather than a yes-or-no check on whether someone has connected or replied. The agent does the work in that step. Nynch keeps track of who it is for and why now. I do the talking.
Where to start this week
Before you open any software, write one page.
Draw your org chart as if you had a five-person team. A chief of staff, two or three managers named after the jobs that actually grow your practice, and the workers underneath. Then pick one recurring job you keep pushing to next week, and write the brief you would give a good VA for it.
If you can write that page, you can run this. The setup takes an afternoon. The thinking is what takes time, and it is the part you are already good at.
The workshop. I am running a paid workshop at fiveclients.com for consultants and fractionals. It is where I am spending most of my time with prospective clients over the next couple of months, and it is the natural next step if this was useful. Take a look at the workshop.
I'm putting some love into my YouTube channel and would love to see you over there for more vids like this - https://www.youtube.com/@peterodonoghuelive