How We’re Solving SMB Problems with Practical AI Agents
You’ve heard the hype: “AI will transform your business.” But when you’re running an SMB, you don’t need hype—you need tools that actually save time, remember your projects, and stop making you repeat yourself.
We’ve been heads-down building the systems that make AI agents work for real businesses. Here’s what we’ve learned—and what’s working today for SMBs like yours.
---
The Problem: AI That Lives in a Chat Box
Most AI tools start and end in a chat window. You ask a question, get an answer, close the tab. Tomorrow, the AI remembers nothing.
For an SMB, that’s useless. Your business isn’t a one-off question. It’s ongoing projects, recurring tasks, client history, and decisions made months ago that you need to reference.
The fix: An AI agent that acts like a persistent operating system for your business—one that remembers who you are, how you work, and what you’ve already figured out.
We’re using an open-source framework called Hermes Agent (from Nous Research) to build exactly this. Think of it as an AI that:
- Remembers your preferences, project conventions, and previous conversations.
- Searches months of sessions to find that one decision or piece of research.
- Saves reusable workflows as “skills” so you don’t reinvent the wheel.
- Runs on a schedule —cron jobs for recurring tasks like follow-ups, reports, or content drafts.
- Works wherever you do—terminal, Discord, soon Telegram—with full access to your tools.
For an SMB, this means your AI agent becomes a real team member that’s never offboarding.
---
From Meetings to Action: No More Lost Notes
Every SMB runs meetings. Client calls, team stand-ups, strategy sessions. What happens to those notes? They sit in a silo—Granola, Google Docs, a notebook—and never become action.
We wired Granola (an AI notetaker) directly into our agent’s system. Now:
- All meeting transcripts are searchable instantly.
- Raw content is pulled and summarized into actions, decisions, and follow-ups.
- Signals feed directly into your company “brain”—a living knowledge base.
No copying and pasting. No “who said what” debates. The agent turns every meeting into a searchable, actionable asset.
For your SMB: Imagine never losing a client request again. Your AI knows every commitment made, every spec discussed, every deadline agreed to.
---
A Living Knowledge Base That Your Team (and AI) Can Query
We built a Git-backed, agent-accessible knowledge base—essentially a public second brain. But for SMBs, the concept is even more powerful: a shared repository of your business’s standard operating procedures, past project learnings, and common solutions.
The flow: Research → Compile → Query → Output.
Your team asks the AI a question about a past project, a process, or a client preference. The AI searches the knowledge base, finds the answer, and delivers it instantly—with context.
We’ve made ours public to demo the idea, but for your business, it stays private and secure. The point is: your business’s knowledge compounds. Every project makes the next one faster.
---
Content Management That Works with AI
If you’re building web content (blog posts, service pages, proposals), you probably use WordPress. That’s fine—we still use it too. But the real shift is: when your AI agent needs to interact with your CMS, APIs matter more than pretty interfaces.
We’re experimenting with modern CMS platforms (Sveltia, Keystatic, TinaCMS, EmDash on Cloudflare) that are API-first. That means your AI agent can:
- Create draft content automatically from meeting notes.
- Update pages based on client feedback.
- Publish blog posts on a schedule.
For the SMB owner, this cuts the content pipeline from “write → edit → publish” to “review and approve.”
---
Where This Is Going for Your Business
The throughline is simple: close the loop between meetings → memory → knowledge → output.
Your AI agent:
- Captures everything from meetings and conversations.
- Remembers your past decisions and preferences.
- Learns reusable workflows that speed up every project.
- Produces content, reports, follow-ups, and more—without manual busywork.
We’re bringing these capabilities to SMBs right now. Not as a dashboard you have to learn, but as a system that works alongside your existing tools.
Your business already has the knowledge. Let’s make it compound.
---
Built with Hermes Agent, Obsidian, Granola MCP, and a focus on practical outcomes for Santa Barbara businesses.