How I Run a Marketing Agency With 6 AI Agents

Does your experience with AI sound a little something like this? You've been prompting for 20 minutes. The output is polished, confident, and completely useless. That's what happens when AI doesn't know anything about your business.

HubSpot's AI works with your actual customer data, every interaction and every signal your team has generated over time. So instead of prompting and hoping, you ask once and ship it. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses. I'm going to bare my soul to you all tonight.

We're going to talk about implementing AI in your organization. And we're going to talk about making one brain that's going to help you all move a lot faster. And I think maybe a good place for me to start first is more so on this slide first. So just a quick show of hands.

How many of you use ChatGPT slash Claude? Okay. Now keep your hand up if you use, let's say you're using Claude code. Okay, keep your hand up. Wow, hands are going up.

Okay, how about Codex, Cloud Code? And then how about Open Clock? Keep your hand up. Okay, and then Hermes Agent. Okay, oh wow, my hand went up. Okay, fascinating, great.

So I'll start on this slide first. For my company at least, the way I think about it is, everyone's talking about AI transformation, change management right now, all these corporate words, right? And people are saying there's a lot of resistance. It's really hard to get people to adapt.

And I remember I was talking to my dad about this because he was a programmer in the 90s and I was using the internet when I was like eight years old or so. And it occurred to me that I was like,

This AI thing is no different than the internet transformation when that was coming out. I was like, Dad, how come you didn't use the internet really? How long did it take your companies to adopt email? He said, a long time.

I'm like, how long is a long time? A very long time. five years right which is crazy to me because now that you have the power of of infinite intelligence your hands you can't afford to wait five years if you're operating a business or you're inside of a business right because if let's say this gentleman up here is compounding at 10x and he does it for 12 months he's a magnet he's already way too far ahead right um versus if if i don't adopt it at all and so

The rubric that we use at my company is really four levels. So you have unacceptable, which is obvious. You're not using any AI at all. Then you have capable, which is where maybe you're using AI.

Maybe you're using Cloud, you're using ChatGP, or maybe you're using it to search. Okay, maybe you believe in it a little bit. And then you have adoptive. It should say adoptive, but there's an A there.

It should say adoptive, which is where you're using, you're building end-to-end workflows, right? Which we'll talk about in a second. And you have transformative where you're building closed loops, which we'll also talk about in a second too.

And, you know, people are talking about end-to-end workflows or talking about closed loops. We'll get there in a moment. But all of this ties back into like how you do this change management thing, right? And so this combines with the whole concept of having a single brain.

And, you know, as recently as last week, the... founder of Shopify wrote a post just saying, oh, we have released this thing into Slack called River. And everyone's like, oh my God, this is amazing, right? River, anybody can talk to River, you know, we're doing all our, we're sending all our pull requests, we're upgrading our product, and then people are just talking to River, and everyone's learning in public, okay?

That's one example. Maybe a month or two ago, Jack Dorsey, founder of Twitter, now called X, he runs Block right now. And he's, you know, they cut 40% of staff, but he talked about this concept of this world brain, okay? So we just call ours single brain because I have single grain with a G. So I bought the domain single brain.

So that's why I call it single brain. And we'll get into it. So let me back up a second here. I'm just going to call it a couple other things. So... This slide shows that only 9% of enterprises are actually scaling with AI right now.

The other 91% are not really touching this as much as they should, right? That sounds a little weird, but anyway, you get the point. So... Almost nobody's shipping right now, and this whole concept of having a single brain is going to help get you there, okay?

And I'll show you some actual examples. I don't want that just be all theory, and I'll maybe, time permitting, maybe I'll give you some practical tips on how you can do it because we've been doing it for ourselves for a couple months now. We've been doing it for our clients. The moment they drink this, it's like game over.

They're just like, whoa. I think one of the, I'll share one of the quotes. One of the clients was like, When I don't have this or it's not working, it feels like I'm drinking soup with a fork, right?

So that doesn't quite work out well, right? So... Execs see it, right? Execs see the benefit of this. Those of you that are running a company right now, you might be seeing the benefits of this, but maybe your team might not be seeing the benefit of this, right?

So 72% of execs can see the benefits, but 10% do not. But the gap isn't necessarily the technology because clearly it's working for some people and for some it's not, but it's the implementation, right? And this will help bridge the gap here. So here's where we get into the actual...

Bits of single brain right here. So you can see these little animals here. My great designer. We have a raccoon. We have a bear. We have a fox, a cat.

Nobody's talking to each other here. You have Salesforce icon. You have a HubSpot icon. You have Google Analytics. You have Slack. You might have Shopify.

You might have Google Search Console. The problem is when none of your tools talk to each other, when none of your data nodes talk to each other, you can't compound. And we all love... compound interest, right?

It's the eighth wonder of the world. And so if your tools don't talk, your knowledge stalls, change management, there's that word again, change management, right? And then what ends up happening is pilots don't ship and everyone gets frustrated. And then what ends up happening is you start having this AI theater in your company.

We've certainly been affected by that in the past where it's like, if Eric wants this, we're going to do this, right? Which is stupid because it doesn't end up benefiting anybody. It doesn't benefit your customers. It doesn't benefit you.

And it ends up being this AI, like, theater that makes it look like you're doing something because of motion, but you're not really doing anything. So the way we think about it is one brain, okay? So you can connect your GitHub, your Slack.

Everything ties into this one brain, okay? You can call it the world brain, unified intelligence, single brain, whatever you want to call it. That's the concept here, all right?

And the org chart then starts to shift. When you start to connect your tools into Slack or Microsoft Teams, here's the thing. You don't need to worry about change management because your team is already working inside of Teams and they're working inside of Slack. So if that's happening already, they're used to talking to humans.

These agents that you have that are living inside your Slack that are connected to all your tools, guess what's happening now? You don't need change management because they're already starting to eat this stuff up, right? So the way this org chart works, and don't worry, we'll share the slides with everyone afterwards, those of you taking pictures as well.

Single brain is at the top. That's the main brain that you have. Around it, you have like, because my company does marketing, right? So we have SEO lead, you have sales, you

have paid media you have ops those are these are people asking questions to single brain up top and then right below it okay so single brain is an agent right it's an ambient agent that lives inside of your your chat tools and then you have a fleet commander like an agent commander that basically will manage all of your other agents below and then you have sub agents below that so we we named ours after like dc characters oracle flash arrow cyborg my designer just decided to make them in like these mammals, I guess.

But it works. So the way it works is you have a human up top, you got the main brain, you have a fleet commander and agent fleet, and then you might have sub agents. That is how this works. And I think this might be interesting right now.

I think in the next 12 months or so, almost everybody's going to be doing it. So you might as well start doing this right now because I don't think it's that particular. I think it's very simple to implement. Is it a pain in the ass?

Yes, but it's still simple and it's worth it. And I'll share some numbers with you later as well. So for us at least, We have six agents. And you want to think about it this way.

You want to have, when you're designing your company around AI, you are designing for specialist agents. So you might have agents that are good at SEO. You might have some that are really good at conversion rate optimization, some that are really good at email marketing. You want them to focus in these areas, right?

And when you set these up, you want to make sure that they're set up in isolated instances so they don't bleed over to each other. And I'm not going to get too technical in this talk because I have limited time.

But for this one, just for example's sake, Alfred is kind of the chief of staff. Hermes, or in our case, we have an Hermes logo in our Slack, so we would call it Hermes. That one is more so like the brain that will check Alfred because you need these agents to check each other.

Sometimes they become unreliable. So there's a lot of work to do around security, stability, and reliability. We like to call that SSR. OK, so a lot of work to be done there.

And then we have like an analytics agent called Oracle. We have Flash to handle social content. And just an example with Flash, it writes a lot of my Twitter posts now. And some of these Twitter posts are getting like 300,000 views, 500,000 views or so.

And we're getting amazing. We're driving amazing pipeline from it. And we're having amazing conversations with people that I never would have imagined that I'd be talking to. And

That's all being driven by just the work I'm doing with these agents and me going to the agent and saying, hey, what's some cool stuff that we did this week that would be a good X long form article. You can do that for LinkedIn as well. You can do that for whatever social channels. There's tons of people doing this for TikTok right now.

You want to talk about TikTok shops, all these things, trying to apply this to e-commerce too. The sky is the limit. Once you start working like this,

everything changes it's not just you love chat gpt anymore it's totally different now right um i think some of you that raised your hand when you with with open claw and hermes you already know what i'm talking about but you as an individual using this is not enough because you're actually depriving your teammates of being able to grow with you as well and you want to bring everyone along ideally um that's what i learned and i was like oh man every day it's like so cool but i'm like But I feel like if my gap is getting, if I'm growing like this and my team's growing like this, that gap's going to get wider and I can't let that happen, right?

And you shouldn't let that happen to yourself and also to your teams. So that's what I'd say. That's what kind of this agent fleet looks like. And then what happens afterwards is as you start to learn this, like I just mentioned, you start to give every person on your team a fleet.

So this paid me to lead. They might have Arrow, which is good for social media, Flash. They might have the Oracle one, which is good for analytics. And they will start to customize it for themselves.

And I mean, look at your desk at work. Look at your home. Look at your car. Don't you like to customize and decorate it? Everybody likes customizing their own, right?

I think some of you who are old enough, I certainly remember this, Tamagotchis, right? Pretty cool, right? Yeah, right. So once you start to give everyone the ability to customize it,

people feel more bought in. Every single person that we've given an individual agent to, we've been testing this, they're like, wow, I feel like I'm reliant on this now. I feel like I can't live without this, right? And so, again, this is something that everybody can build on their own, right?

The reason why, again, I call that Open Claw and Hermes, these types of agents, is these types of agents allow you to do this type of stuff and unlock the ability for you to have this unified brain, this world brain that a lot of people are talking about. And it seems scary when they're talking about it, but once you start to implement it, it's really not that bad, okay? So, again, you have an ambient brain for your company, then you have a fleet for yourself, and then you make one for your company, and then you start to scale a lot faster.

So, in terms of, maybe there's three levels right now to all this, right? You have, you have, Do it yourself, okay? You have done for you and then done with you.

Okay, so on the very left side here, you probably can't see it as well. Do it yourself. Maybe you're using ChatGPT, maybe you're using Claude, maybe you're using Claude Co-Work, and you're just going back and forth with it, right?

done for you is when you're working with these specialist agents, okay, where you have these end-to-end workflows. And let me explain what that means. So an end-to-end workflow is when you have a human input. That's the first step.

I'll go over here. Human input first. Then the AI does thinking in the middle, and then the human reviews the output, right? And you think about a lot of the workflows that we're doing at work.

These things are all just workflows, right? So when Then what happens is you build a bunch of these workflows together. And then what happens is you start to create these specialist agents that can do a bunch of things around SEO or, you know, conversion rate optimization, paid media, ad creative, which we have like one that spins up a ton of ad creatives.

And I'll show you an example in a second. But Once you're able to do that, then you start to create loops, okay? So the way I look at the org chart of the future is you have specialist agents and then you have loops.

And a loop is basically a bunch of different tasks that you might insert agents into. And then you just have people, a human at the top, managing these loops. So the future is really agents, loops, right? And workflows.

And if you have an org chart that compounds that way, you're just gonna grow a lot faster. And the thing is, anybody on my team that is using this stuff right now,

Work, when I ask them, and I'm just like, hey, don't BS me. Are you having fun? I'm like, more fun than I've ever had. How hard are you working right now?

Harder than I've ever worked, okay? The only thing I'm concerned about right now with these AI-pilled people on my team is actually burnout. That's the only thing I'm concerned about right now. Now, on the flip side of that, the people who aren't AI-pilled right now

it's like, oh my God, it's like trying to drag someone over and it's, you can't, you can, you can bring a horse to water, but you can't make them drink, right? So that's the challenge that I have as a business owner right now. I want to bring everyone along, but not necessarily everyone's going to want to come along and you're going to have some tough decisions that you might have to make, right?

And, you know, as noble as it might be that you want to bring everyone along, you just can't. But I will say the ones that, that are super AI pulled right now. It's such a pleasure.

It's such a joy to work with these people. I look forward to coming into work every day. I don't dread it anymore. And you can apply this to e-commerce.

You can apply this to any form of marketing. You can apply this to services. List goes on. So, The way we see it is one human plus five agents is a 10X team member, okay?

Maybe even 50X, maybe even 100X or so. But we're just looking at leverage ultimately because when you have the ability to call on this ambient brain whenever you want, you're actually compressing time.

So next slide, I'm going to show you what I mean by that, but just think about it. If you're with an e-commerce company right now, you have to, maybe a year ago, two years ago, if you wanted to get a data pool from your data scientist or your data analyst, what is that?

Three days, four days, a week? A week's pretty effing crazy to me, right? Because a week is 2% of the year, right? Oh, two weeks, 4% a year. Are you kidding me, right?

So like, and they don't want to do the data pool for you. Like, you don't want to ask for the data pool. Like, it's a pain in the butt, right? So you might as well just ask the thing.

Instead of waiting for a week, you get it in seconds. And you compound it on all the things that you need from a context standpoint. You're just able to move a lot faster, right? So I'll show you an example here on the screen.

So this is inside of Slack. This is me asking for data, okay, to Oracle. And maybe you can't read the text, but you can get the slides afterwards. And here's like, oh, here's how Meta's performing right now.

Okay, cool. Here are the top spending campaigns, right? And then Christy comes in. Hey, I want to refresh this Meta ad creative over here. What should we do?

Okay, Picasso comes in. That's another agent that we have that does ad creatives. And then it does more data over here. And then after that, it's okay.

It's starting to strategize with my team. It's starting to say, okay, here's what's happening right now. But the most interesting part is when you're able to combine the agents. So boom, Picasso spun up a bunch of different variations based on what was already performing well, right?

So you can just say, hey, look at my meta ad account. I want you to double down on creatives that are working. I want you to spin up 100, 200 different variations.

I want you to kill the campaigns that aren't working right now. And then let's move on to the next thing, right? And the crazy thing is now, those of you that raised your hand with Open Claw and Hermes, you know this already. But you can literally, now you have the slash goal command that can help you do a lot of stuff overnight, right?

It can help you finish tasks and you can go a lot further in terms of just getting things done. And you can plug this in. So there's so many, any of you that have played video games growing up, there's so many different upgrades you can add every single day. And that's what it feels like.

At least for me, it feels like I'm playing a video game, right? And I hope it feels that way for you too once you start to do this. All right. Some examples here, you can simply ask it, oh, what's our ROAS this week?

Okay, and you can see the performance over here. Then you can go deeper. Okay, what's our ROAS? Which creatives, again, which creatives should we double down on?

What are our competitors doing right now? Okay, what does their ad library look like? What are the longest-standing ads that they had running for a long time? Approximately, what are they spending right now?

What are some other ads that are working in maybe adjacent industries right now that we should consider? Okay, let's spin up 500 variations, right? That is all possible now. It wasn't possible before, but again, when you're able to compress, let's say, 22 weeks of work into 22 seconds, the sky's the limit, right?

So that's why... earlier with David backstage, we were just talking about, I was showing him these AI stocks. I'm not going to tell you. I don't want to give you financial advice.

But man, some of these are just parabolic, right? I looked at one, it's like up 5,000% or something in the last year or so. And these are all part of the AI stack. But if we're all trying to buy this infinite intelligence,

that we've never had before, like, I think the build-up, it's going to go even crazier, right? And so, anyway, all that to say, if you can do this for your business right now, what's going to happen in a year? Scale it to 200 variants. Scale 500 variants, whatever it is exactly.

And here's just an example. If you put a prompt in, campaign out, hey, I want more landing pages over here. I want nurture emails spun up. And so, with one of these single brain agents, it literally...

it will put together your cold email infrastructure, okay? Or it can put together your nurture sequence. So what it did for us was it literally bought 100 email domains. It came up with a naming vernacular as well.

It also... it also put together the sequences and it recursively self-improves, meaning that it constantly is testing itself over time, right? And so that is a closed loop, right? We want to think about, once you start to use this, you want to think about how many closed loops can you build?

Because a year ago, two years ago, three years ago, us humans were working in open loops. Oh, Bob. I know your name's not Bob, but Bob, how's that status report going right now?

Mike, how are the paid ads going over there? Anna, creatives, how's that going right now? How annoying is that? Nobody wants to do that, right? Nobody wants to check in with each other.

By the way, I'm in the client services business. I even talk to my clients too. When I show them this stuff, I'm like... Let's be honest. You don't want to talk to me.

I don't want to talk to you. Like, if we just do good work, who cares, right? And they're like, exactly. And like, right? Literally, I did that. So I'm like, I don't usually get on the client calls, but I've been hopping on them recently.

And they're all like, yeah. And like, you also have to help your team understand this too, right? Like, because they're so like, they tend to overwhelm themselves. But if you start to get them to see the light in terms of how to work this way, my God, work's gonna be way more fun.

By the way, this is an example. Once you have an ambient agent going, I was like, oh... you know, man, our costs have been kind of going up a little bit.

Can you make me a CFO agent? And so it made me a CFO agent and looked at all my costs. And it's like, yeah, you're being really stupid with your spend here in X, Y, and Z. Within three days, so he found me 500 grand in savings.

I cut all those costs, 500 grand saved. And some people are like, oh, Eric, how do you justify the $12,000 a month you're spending on AI tokens, right? Well, this is how, because this is the ROI that you get.

By the way, I'll give you a fun tip. You should probably write this one down. How many of you are spending a lot of money on tokens at your companies right now? Like over 10 grand a month?

Okay. 50 grand a month? 100 grand a month? Anybody? Okay. Well, it's probably going to become that at some point, right? Because we're paying for this intelligence.

It's unreasonable for us to not pay for this, right? So my token costs, and maybe we'll talk about this in that marketing school recording that we do in a little bit with Neil, is

but my cost got up to $12,000 with entropic spend, right? And I'm like, man, like I'm having fun and sure, I can argue that I'm getting ROI, but that's still crazy to me. So if you want to drive your token cost to zero, maybe not zero, but a lot cheaper,

All you have to do is, because right now I'm paying for Claude, so I paid $200 a month, and then I started buying more and more open AI accounts, because ChatGPT 5.5 is actually more, for right now, to me, is more superior than Opus 4.7, which is Claude's best model, right? And All that happens now is for $200 a month, they're very generous. You can eke out like $5,000, $10,000, $15,000 in tokens.

And so once I run out on the first one, guess what? I switch to the other one, $200 a month. And I'm just going to keep doing this $200 a month until everyone starts abusing this. And then the party's over.

So maybe I shouldn't have told you guys this, but I figure someone's going to do it. So I might as well just tell you, but you're welcome. You have gotten an ROI from this conference already.

So anyway. Agents are the new buyers, right? You have to optimize accordingly. This is kind of going into, if you're using your Ambien agents, you have to think about how you can optimize.

Like how many of you have software companies, anybody? Or work at software companies? Okay, not many, okay. So I look at it this way. You have D to C, right?

We have B to B. You now have B to A, which is business to agent, because everyone's spinning up all these agents now, and you can see the way I'm treating my agents. It's almost like my chief of staff, my assistant, and I have multiple ones, right? I just want them to do maybe the buying actions for me.

I don't want to do the research. And so, you know, Stripe recently just came out with the ability for agents to purchase. Shopify has their, I think it's called UCP. So everything is kind of going into, hey, how do we enable agents to purchase more?

Cloudflare, for example, you can actually buy Cloudflare infrastructure. And so I think about this from an SEO background. Oh my God, I can spin up so many different landing pages and so many different subdomains. I can buy all of these things and just tell my agent to do it.

So, When you think about from an SEO standpoint, you're going to want your agents to optimize for that. And here's one thing I'll say. If you have a software company, for all these agents are crawling all the API documentation.

They're crawling all the MCP documentation, right? Yesterday, and by the way, you guys can reach out to me for this. I have a contact at Shopify that texted me yesterday. He's like,

I lead the Shopify API slash MCP. I want to talk to a lot of e-commerce companies, right? So if that's you, feel free to hit me on Twitter or Instagram, and I'm happy to put you in touch with him. But that's literally what they're doing.

And when I'm talking to him, he's like, yeah, we're all in MCPs, APIs. You think about Salesforce, for example. They've gone headless, right? And so if I were to simplify this...

what these companies are all saying now is that the UI is still maybe useful to humans, but because the agents are going to outnumber us, maybe a hundred to one, a thousand to one or so you're, it's really important that you optimize for the agents. Right. And so for a lot of, there's a company recently, they, all they do is create documentation for, uh, for, uh, for software companies, and they just raised $50 million in a $500 million valuation.

All they do is just create developer documentation. And the reason it's exploding right now is because there's a big demand by companies to do this, and they don't want to write it themselves, but they know they need the agents to pick it up. It's almost like SEO for agents, right? That's one way to think about it.

Now, you can apply this to all the other... areas in how you're doing work right now, but there's no way we can run from this, right? It's time to start optimizing for the agents.

Schemas are really important too, thinking about how you optimize. I'm not going to go too far into SEO because it's not an SEO talk. APIs are the sales deck now, right? Or MCPs because

When my agent works, it's often looking for documentation and it's looking for these APIs. And once it finds it, it just starts using it. That's why a lot of these companies like Supabase or Vercel have been growing parabolically. It's crazy growth, right?

Millions and millions in terms of new users or new account creation. So think about this. Like if you're optimizing, oh, guess what? Who's going to be buying from your e-commerce store in the future?

Probably agents, right? So how do you prove to the agents that maybe you're the company that they should be buying from? I don't know. Up for you. for you to figure out.

I don't have an e-commerce store. So what I'll say is this, and then maybe I'll end with a few thoughts here. So three moves by Friday. I think it's really important that you pick one workflow that repeats every single week that provides the largest ROI.

And I don't know what that is for you, but I think you need to think about it, right? And then maybe you could go to developer on your team. Okay. Hey, I heard about this, this Asian dude talking about open claw and Hermes, um, on stage.

I have no idea what the heck he's talking about. Can you help me here? Um, and then say, and then share this deck because I'm going to give you the QR code in Mamba, share the deck, right? And then figure out how you can just have one repeating workflow.

And once it works, oh my God, light bulb moment. Okay. And we have Satya Nadella over here, right? So AI agents will be the primary way we interact with computers.

It's already happening right now. And that's why these companies are putting so much CapEx towards these data center build outs. It's because work is way more fun this way.

Some of the things I remember, so I gave you the soup analogy earlier. One person we talked to is like, oh my God, I'm, and yeah, literally he said, oh my God, right? Oh my God, I'm 40% faster at least. Someone else said,

I hate to say this to you, Eric, because it's admitting that you're right, but I feel like I'm reliant on this now. Okay? Well, that's also good. We talked to a customer this week.

They're like, oh... Yeah, it would be really painful if I didn't have this anymore, right? And so that is what's happening right now. I'm telling you, everyone's going to be doing this, I think, in the next 12 months or so.

Maybe the world's a little slower than that, maybe 18 months or so. But you might as well start doing it now. And the cool thing is you can start doing it for free using an open claw, using a Hermes. Set it up for yourself.

Set up your own agent to help you with scheduling, planning, maybe even personal stuff initially. And then once you figure that out, start to think about all the annoying work stuff that you have to do. And then if you're working for a company, you can go to your manager, go to your leader and just say, hey, look, I figured all this stuff out. I optimized all these workflows and then what's going to happen?

Guess what? You now have leverage and you can either build the leverage at that company or you can go to another company and do it because you know how to build this stuff now, right? I think it...

People think this is harder than it actually is. That's my opinion. I'm not a technical person. I just like nerding out on this stuff. And if you want to get better at this, I would highly recommend that you're just hanging out on X all the time.

Smartest people, smartest engineers in the world. Everyone's just talking about building. The energy's really good there, right? LinkedIn, probably not so much.

I think LinkedIn's like six months behind, right? The thing now is frontier lab engineers like OpenAI or Claude or Anthropic, sorry, or maybe three, four months ahead, and then you have people on X are three, four months behind, and then you have like another set that are three, four months behind, and then you have like the rest of the world, right? The fact that you're in this room right now that you're spending Thursday night here, thank you for spending Thursday night here, it shows that you are in the 1% of learners, right?

All you have to do is continue to push that advantage and also make sure that you don't burn out too. So build the brain first. The top 10%, top 1% of operators are already doing it. I think it's like maybe top 0.1% or so.

The QR code is right here if you want to slide, so I'll let you scan it for a second. We'll do like 10, 9, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2. Good now? Okay. All right.

Well, thank you so much. And I'll be back in a little bit, but appreciate your time.