Automate, Build, or Buy? The New Agency Playbook

We're back with another agency, wait a minute, no, I'm filling in the roles. Two, four very big shoes. Kurt and Toby are on vacation, so I'm covering for them on the Agency Action Podcast. So welcome everyone. It's your lovely host Matt with special guest Brendan O'Connell. We're going to talk all about AI stuff today. Today, Brendan and I chatted, we've chatted multiple times on the WP Minute podcast, but this is going to be maybe about a six-month hiatus since you and I have officially hit the airwaves. Brendan, what do you think? Yeah, I think back in January or February. So good to be back. Lots of things have changed, obviously, in the technology of AI and website building and agency life. Brendan has done a bunch in his personal career, professional career. So excited to talk about how he has seen the landscape shift since he and I last chatted. And maybe it resonates with you, the agency owner who's like listening to all this news of, you know, hey, we're going to lose our jobs. Is WordPress in trouble? This is stuff we were questioning like a year ago. Maybe being solidified a little bit more on the product side these days in terms of that in the headlines, but really interested to dive in. I mean, I'm using AI differently than I was just six months ago. And I just want to unpack a lot of that stuff today. So Agency Action Podcast. Agencyactionpodcast.com, where you can catch up with all of these podcasts, episodes, via a retro arcade machine that I built with AI as a way to play a video game of Agency Action. If you don't want to listen to the whole episode, it's actually one of the ways that I experience Agency Action. So check that out, agencyactionpodcast.com. Brendan, I want to frame this question for you. When AI started to really become more mainstream for us prosumers and professionals in the space, you were doing a lot with like N8N and automation at that time. Like you were really big into that. And then like AI started coming in. Where have you landed with like the days of, Brendan, I'm going to create these blueprints of N8N to now like, oh, maybe AI is just the mind hive that we need to do all this stuff. Where have you landed in your technology stack these days? Traditional automation versus AI. Yeah, I mean, that's a good question. Because I think for a lot of people, AI is still kind of a black box, right? Because they put a prompt in and it does something and it spits something out. And N8N is still a visual workflow builder. And, you know, I actually do still use N8N quite a bit because it is, you know, you own sort of the infrastructure and you can kind of go in and tweak things a little more easily. And, you know, it's not such a black box, right? So, you know, I do still use it quite a bit, actually. And I use them in conjunction, right? Because you can get your AI to build your N8N workflow for you these days, which is pretty nice. But, you know, I also use automation within my AI workflows as well. So, I don't know. I mean, it's an interesting concept, right? That now it's, before it was right, it was just sort of build your automation, maybe put a little AI in there. And now it's maybe a little heavier on the AI side. But I think people are probably a little inclined to skip the automation step and not really understand how APIs work. And I think that's still a valuable skill. So, yeah. And I think that's one of the unlocks for agency owners who might be building stuff alongside of their, you know, client WordPress sites. Because I would say that the benefit to AI right now, there's obviously a lot of people like, hey, I'm just going to like replace WordPress with Astro or some other like static thing. That's not really the conversation I want to have. I want to have the conversation of like, who's still building with WordPress, but expanding their value to the customer by building things that sit alongside WordPress, right? Reporting tools, you know, dashboards, bringing in data and other content, you know, into WordPress, connecting to other APIs that you otherwise might not be. You might have a plugin for or something like that. But I'm really interested to see how this evolves over the next, I mean, I'm just going to call it the six months, right? All the way throughout the end of the year. And see what people are building as agency owners that ride alongside WordPress instead of just replace WordPress. That's not really the flag I want to fly, if that makes sense. Yeah. No, I mean, even just today, I was in some Facebook group and someone was trying to, you know, ask about how do I get a bunch of YouTube videos into my WordPress site or something like that. And, you know, most of the suggestions were, oh, well, just ask Claude to build a plugin to do it. And, you know, some of that was most of the suggestions. And it's like, well, yeah, I mean, I guess you could do that. And that's probably how most of people are going to approach it these days. But it's like a lot of those comments at the bottom were like, use N8N or use another automation tool like Flowmatic or some other WordPress plugin that already exists that does that for you. And so, I mean, yeah, there's, you know, it's the it's kind of the age old question of like buy versus build. And, you know, the the the the idea of, you know, what what it takes to build something is going down and down and down. So, yeah, you could you could just build something now for sure. But, you know, there's solutions out there that already exist. And understanding how stuff works is still it's still important. Yeah. How have you adjusted to the speed? I'm going to put that in air quotes, the speed of A.I. If you can, you know, reflect maybe even a year or two years ago, how have you adjusted to the speed of waiting? Maybe that's not the maybe speed isn't the right word, but how have you adjusted to waiting for something to finish in A.I.? Do you feel yourself getting like more antsy? Like, come on now, finish this, like finish this task when like a year ago you're like, I'll wait an hour for this thing to finish because now I could never do it. Do you feel yourself shifting to like if this thing's not done in five minutes, I need to go find like another LLM to deal with? You feel like that psychosis or that emotion changing in you as you've become a more maybe A.I. forward developer over the last two, three, one to two, three years? Yeah, a little bit. I mean, I think I think this whole sort of social experiment that they've been running on us. Yes, that's where I was going. Thank you. Yeah, this is this has turned us all into incredible people that have, you know, we've we've been building a lot more. Right. But we've also our ADHD is off the charts now. When I switch to a lower, a lower tier model, I've been using command code a lot. I don't know if you've checked that out, but it lets you kind of switch between models on command. And, you know, so so I'll sometimes switch between some of the open weight models and try those out. And man, some of those are really nice, right, because they're super cheap, but they are a lot slower than Claude. And yeah, like I'll just sit there waiting for a long time and then I'll end up going back to Claude a lot of. Switch back to Codex or whatever. But yeah, you know, and then we open up another terminal and start working on another task or use the slash BTW feature and and open up another chat that way. Yeah, it's it's hard to resist that. Right. Because we feel like our time is so precious now and we need to always be productive and be working to get the most out of that five hour window and get all of our tokens in and get the most out of our subscription. I try to resist it the most I can, though, because it's it's not good for our brains. Yeah, I mean, I can definitely feel I wonder if it's just because we are. Whether we realize it or not, like we are creative. I'm just speaking, I guess, for myself, but I imagine seeing what you do, what you post online and stuff where we're kind of similar is we're creative people. We like to build things and we like we like to have these ideas come to life. Therefore, like this is crack to us. Like this is my God, I've had a gazillion ideas and now I can just open up a tab. One idea is cooking, move to the next. That idea is cooking. Got a third idea. Do it over here. And I'll often catch myself. In any given what I'll call work session, I'll have four tabs. And this is probably I'm probably, you know, not running as much as most people, but like four tabs of four different things being built. And I'm just jumping in between them. Meanwhile, I'll have like the chat GPT window open in my browser. They're asking it questions going like, hey, I got this other idea. Like, what do you like? Just like I'm just throwing spaghetti against the wall over here while cooking in the kitchen with these four apps. And at the end of the day, like there is a sense of accomplishment, but it's also like, holy shit. Now, what do I do with all of this stuff? But I think that's what they unlocked or they hit us in a different way that no other product has before as creative people. And that's like the thing. Like, that's where the pressure comes from for me. I don't find myself worrying about the cost or the tokens and stuff like that. It's more about like, wow, I can get all these ideas to life. I don't know if you feel the same way. Yeah. Well, and honestly, like I never really ever felt like a very creative person to begin with. Like, I never felt like an idea person or someone who was, you know, coming up with the best next thing or whatever. And I probably still am not, obviously. I'm not coming up with the next million dollar thing. Right. But yeah, I mean, I think you're right that they've figured out how to unlock that in people that work with code and work with apps and things like that and work with websites. And it's addicting. Right. You're absolutely right. And I do kind of worry that when we reach the end of the subsidy era, what that's going to do. Yeah. Because right now, you know, I use this thing called agents view that shows like how much we've spent, right, in terms of our token usage. And we're getting a good deal right now because it's subsidized. And when that era ends, if and when it ends, it's going to be hard because we're getting used to this feeling of creative juices flowing all the time. And yeah, it's going to be interesting when that happens. I'm really concerned about that. And I think, you know, I think what you see with Claude or excuse me, I should say Anthropic, what you see with Anthropic is this balance between. I feel like when Opus 4.6 hit, they did that as like, you know, I don't know what the proper phrase would be, but they're like, hey, we got this awesome thing that we have, you know, internally. Let's let it loose in Opus 4.6. Get people to be like, oh, my God, this is like, this is the coding model, at least for coding stuff. This is the model. And then they realize, oh, maybe we gave them too much, maybe 4.6. Like we gave them too much with 4.6. And ever since 4.6, they've been trying to rebalance what that product matrix is going to look like. We hear things about Mythos, which they've already started to condition us like you'll never have that. And if you do, it's going to be like $20,000 per million tokens. But then they released Fable and that was like, oh, the government had to step in. And then they said, OK, we have it for seven days and then 14 days. And I just got re-extended again this weekend at the time of this recording. And I feel like they're trying to balance that product matrix of how do we get people to sort of softly land in like a middle area that they can, that we can charge them a couple hundred bucks with. And that'll be the floor. But then as soon as you start to look to that fable or that mythos, now you're talking thousands of dollars. Right. And that's how they're going to condition us to sort of stair step until eventually you're like, oh, God, do I can I afford this one? And two, like, do I just want to wait more time and use Sonnet 5 or Sonnet 7 in the future? That's going to cost like 50 bucks a month, but take 10 times longer to produce something. I feel like out of all of them, they're the ones that are trying to really balance that matrix of not rug pull, but I guess condition us to what future costs are going to be. At the same time, though, we have these open weight model like GLM GLM 5.2 is coming up behind them and is very capable. And so I think they I think you're right that that's their their thinking. But then they're they're seeing these open weight models come from behind thinking that that's changing their their calculus. Right. So I think that they're that's why they're they're cute. They keep having to kind of extend these these these trials for fable. They keep having to release newer and newer models. I think it's changing their their economics a lot. And so, you know, who knows what's going to happen, because I think that that was that was probably their thinking. Right. That they all will just we'll just give them these, you know, four point six level models and call it a day and then keep these, you know, lock these higher level models behind these paywalls. But I don't think that's going to be the case anymore because these open weight models are very competitive now. Yeah. Yeah. The I guess the big challenge with that is because I've tried. So I don't use command code, but I've tested things with open router. I believe that's what it's called open router. I haven't spent much time, but I've just like experimented with some things. And then I tried another local tool, which I bought one night. I was like, oh, I'm going to run and see if I can find the app. I always forget the name of it because I don't use it often. Let me just see if I see it. LM studio, which allows you to run local models on your desktop. And one night I bought. This high powered Windows laptop because it has the NVIDIA 4090 graphics card in it. So I was like, oh. Business expense. Stupid. But anyway, so I bought it just to run these models. And even with that, even with that graphics card, which has 24 gigabytes. I mean, obviously it's on a desktop, which has 32 for the graphics card. But even that was more powerful than what I'm going to run on my MacBook in terms of a dedicated graphics card. GPU and running those models locally is still. Dog slow. And I think where these guys are going to win is how do you manage this compute power to run these models? And who's going to win at that? And I know a lot of people talk about this and like data centers and all that stuff. And Google versus NVIDIA, you know, versus OpenAI and Apple. Like who's going to build all this processing? I want open source to win. And my fear is we're not going to have enough CPU power to run this stuff until these things get really, really much smaller to run on local machines. That's my fear anyway. Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, for sure. I mean, I tried to run even just like a base level Google Gemma 4 model. And my apparently powerful gaming laptop can barely handle it too. So you're right on that front. You know, I think give it a year and we'll see these be able to run on a phone maybe. You know, but at the same time, yeah, I mean, something like command code, I guess, is still like I'm accessing these open-wave models, not on my local device, right? I'm hitting some server that they're running. And so, you know, they're probably not using the best compute power that Anthropix is using. But so, you know, I don't know how that compute matrix is working there. But yeah, I don't know how that's going to unfold. So yeah, the future is definitely interesting for these for like hosting companies. Yeah, and what they do, because we think of hosting in the traditional sense, like to pull it back to WordPress, like obviously, if you start seeing product companies in WordPress starting to like decline in sales. I mean, I guess the question is, is like, what kind of product do you have? And, you know, how are you, you know, if you have just like utility products, those will probably be the first to go, right? Like if you have small little plugins that do things that you can quickly whip up with a codex or a clod, like, yeah, it's going to be a tough business. So like what can you do to extend that? Folks, like in my career, my thing that puts the food on the table for me, Gravity Forms, like we have a little bit more insulation against that because it's a big plugin. But when you start to look at it, like, am I going to code a replacement for this? Yeah, maybe I'll code a simple contact form replacement. But if I need something to replicate on all my client sites with all the add-ons and connections, do I want to risk that for 200 bucks a year to buy Gravity Forms? Probably not. Let me just spend the 200 bucks. But the hosting companies would obviously be next in line, right? If we all are having this impact in WordPress with WordPress getting pulled away from because of AI, hosting companies are going to have to change. And I was thinking the other day, hosting companies might be like your mall. Now, I don't know about your mall, if you have a mall in your area, in the U.S. anyway. This is places where people used to go to one big building with a bunch of stores in it. And now nobody goes to one big building with a bunch of stores in it anymore. Like, I don't know anyone who goes shopping at the mall like it used to. So I see a few malls in my area who are, like, reinventing themselves. Now they have grocery stores in them. Now they have co-working spaces in them. Now they have play centers in them. It's not like 25 retail outlets anymore. Hosting companies might have to shift to be like, okay, we don't do websites anymore. We do inference. We do all of this, like, open router compute. Like, they have to kind of shift their model into, you know, the future world. Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple that come on. I mean, like, Hostinger, I guess, is one that comes off the top of my head. They've kind of embraced, I think, the AI agent craze, right? They were one of the first to really offer OpenClaw hosting and now Hermes hosting. Where it's sort of, and other ones, right? You can do N8N hosting. You can do sort of one-click deploy, right? They have Docker installs for a lot of different apps that's not just. And I don't know what their start was, if they were strictly WordPress to begin with or not. But they've sort of expanded their product line to keep up with demand. And I wouldn't be surprised if most of their recent income is from stuff like OpenClaw and Hermes. Yeah. Have you, speaking of these agents, have you gone down the route of OpenClaw and Hermes? Have you any war stories from trying to set one of those bad boys up? Or do you ever use them in your day? Yeah, big Hermes fan. Yeah, I've been using that a lot. I have several running. I do have it running on a VPS for our company because we're a distributed team. And so we have it running on a VPS, locked behind Tailscale. And it's been great. It lives in our Slack. And it updates us every day. It ingests our meeting notes from Granola. And it's like one of our employees almost. And it's been very useful. It updates our Notion and updates our task lists. And, I mean, it's very useful, I got to say. And then I run it myself also on my personal computer. Talk with it on Discord and Slack and Telegram. And I can chat with it on my phone and stuff like that. And it's getting easier and easier to set up now. Now the team behind it, Noose Research, just launched the cloud version where you can just set it up. Also, I think it's like under $10 a month to host it if you want to do that. And I got to say, it's very easy to set up now. The barrier to setting that stuff up is pretty low now. So you're not dealing with a ton of environment variables and API keys and stuff like that. It's getting easier and easier to set up for non-technical people. Yeah. I have what I call the JeffBot, right? So the JeffBot just summarizes content articles from other WordPress sites from a collection of like, I don't know, 40 or 50 RSS links that I have. Right. And it pings Slack. It summarizes it, pings Slack with the link in the JeffBot channel. And it's all saved. That's all just like Cloudflare running, crontask, saving to a database so that at any point I can do more with it. Like give me a weekly update or what were the most talked about topics for this year or this quarter. And to me, I'm just like, it just feels cleaner to run it that way versus constantly thinking about managing some kind of like agent infrastructure. But I assume like as the stuff gets easier and better, I'm also of the mindset like Claude or Anthropic and OpenAI will come up with a native agent. And when they do that, I'm just going to be like, freaking you, I'll just pay you for it. Like I don't want to go set this up on my own and run another VPS infrastructure. You just run it for me. That's my mindset. But it's good to hear that you have some success with that stuff. Yeah. I mean, it's also open source. I think that's one of the things that, I mean, I'm not going to get, I'm not going to pay Anthropic API costs. Like that's insane. Yes. And they're going to want you to. They came out with, I don't know what they called it, like Claude. I can't keep up with all their product releases, but they released some kind of thing where you put it in Slack and it responds to things like that. And it was like a half-baked Hermes. Yeah. And they got a lot of criticism for it because it was just, it was half-baked and it was just not good. And Hermes is, I don't know, maybe I'm a bit of a fanboy, but I mean, it's, you can switch models. You can combine models together on it. I mean, it's, it's pretty amazing what you can do. I mean, just as like a test case, I like was able to just, just automate, just go in with a new business. I have set up a new profile, get everything up and running in under an hour. I mean, you can't beat that. But what's the advantage with like, when you think of it as, I'll frame how, like if I, I'm mostly in Claude code and then I use Codex when I either hit a limit or I just want to run like documentation tasks, front end edit tasks on some of these projects. Like I'll use Codex for that and a lot of like the heavy work I'll use Claude. And then if I ever want to put something on, um, on a Cron job that you, that I want analyzed every, you know, every day, every hour, every week, whatever. That's when I'm just like, okay, I got Wrangler, uh, installed obviously locally on my machine, go and set up a Cloudflare worker, run this Cron X amount of times, do the thinking, shoot it over to this either R2 or database layer. Like I have my pockets of things that I turn to. And then when I want to ask questions, generally it's in chat GPT when I'm kind of like brainstorming stuff. Where does the Hermes agent fit in for you? Like, how do you think of it? Is it coding for you or is it just like context, context tasks with memory that you interface with it? Yeah, it's, I mean, it's probably less on the coding side. Yeah. It's more like tasks and the Cron stuff for sure. Um, I mean, you can, you can use it to, to code for sure, but I mean, I don't, I don't hook up the really expensive models to it. Like I'm running the cheapo models through open router mostly with it. And I mean, have a couple of fallback models, but I mean, I have, I think I have codecs hooked up to it as well, but, um, mostly it's, it's, yeah, like you said, it's like those Cron jobs that need automating and things like that. Um, so it's less, less on the coding side and more on like repetitive tasks. And, you know, I use something like, uh, there's this really awesome service called Composio that lets you basically connect all your different services without needing to get actual API keys. Like it's just a one click install. And then Hermes has access to your notion, to your Slack, to your, whatever you want to give it access to. And you can fine grain tune what it has access to. So basically just one click install what it has access to and you're off to the races. Hmm. That's interesting. I have, um, yeah, like a lot of the, uh, we can talk about if you want to talk about some of like the cool projects maybe that you've built that you can talk about. Um, cause I know some cool stuff that you can't talk about. Uh, but if you have cool stuff you do want to talk about, we can talk about it. But I, I envision using, I just haven't got there yet. I, I think, and I think for an agency owner, I've seen, um, my friend, uh, Troy Dean from agency Mavericks. He's been all in on this, I guess it's app called Victor V I K T O R. I don't know if you've seen it. I guess it's big in the agency space and it's like, uh, I mean the way that I perceive it, the, the content that he puts out, it's like, uh, a Hermes, but for agency owners. That, I mean, again, I, you'd have to go do your own research on, on that. And I've seen him like loving it and he uses it for like client proposals and managing clients. And I see a world where like a Hermes or an agent can and maybe should do that. Like, here's all the knowledge about my customer. Here's their website. Here's their analytics. You know, talk to me about what's happening, you know, with their, with their site, with their product. Uh, follow them on social media and track the social posts that they're putting out so that I know they've been happy with their, like they've been pointing to their site. They've been telling people to go, you know, sign up to the newsletter. Like I can see that as like a massive value add for an agency owner. I just don't know if it's, if it's there yet and how accurate these agents are at this stage in the game to like really replace what I might call a project manager or a customer success person in a typical company. That makes sense. Yeah. No, I mean, I, I mean, I'm never in the business of, uh, replacing people. And I was going to say that as well. Yeah, no, I mean, and, and I've had that conversation with, with other business owners where they're like, oh, can I just use this Hermes agent to replace my project manager? I'm like, well, that's not really, it's not really what I'm trying to propose here. Yeah. Yeah. Uh, it's more like augmenting or trying to make sure they're not making mistakes and things like that. Uh, I mean, I think there's a lot of, a lot of the, the work that project managers do where it's, uh, taking, taking meeting notes and turning it into, uh, tasks for your team. I think that, that kind of stuff is, is definitely there. Um, and you know, making sure that there's not context drift, um, you know, that, that you're not, uh, you know, having, having stuff, threads get lost and, and, you know, dates get changed. And, and there's not, you know, stuff that's, you know, getting lost in, in the, in the, the hustle and bustle of agency life that we all know about. Um, that I think that's an important thing that, that these agents can really do. And that's something that I've seen in my day-to-day life with, uh, with this Hermes agent that we have in our company. It's really helped with that kind of stuff for sure. Um, I think that the year, I mean, you're right to not really put your full trust in these things yet. I think that's, that's an important thing, you know, making sure that there's human in the loop thing that you're, that you're still like, you know, human is approving what these agents are doing. That's, that's good. Um, uh, there was a, there was a good article that the Shopify team put out about their agent called River, uh, a couple months ago that, that lives in their Slack. And it's all about how they've also just moved everything out of Slack DMs into public channels. And that's really helped the agent just like become more aware and get better context because if everything lives out in public channels and less in DMs, then it just, it gets smarter and smarter and has better context about how your company works. And that's, I recommend, I recommend people read that article and, and that's, that's sort of how I've, you know, kind of built my Hermes agents, uh, moving forward for, for my clients as well. Um, because that's, I think these things are only as good as the context you give them and the tools you give them. Right. Right. So, yeah, I've been running a, you know, my own social experiment, which, which you know about with like the civic, uh, tooling that I've been, uh, working on for a while. Right. And it's grown beyond, I haven't really updated you on it, but, um, you know, I had like that 311, a non-emergency reporting tool, potholes, et cetera, et cetera. That's been running for a while, but over the last month or so, um, I've had that meetings app and the meetings app just ingests the, uh, the, um, transcripts from YouTube and gives place, gives people a place to, uh, search through all these meetings through the transcripts. And I do the timestamp topics and all this stuff. And it sort of sheds light on all like these boring, long government meetings that no one's ever going to watch. And then like, hopefully distilling it down to, you know, simple chapters and keyword search for people to find. But over the last, um, month or so, I've built out a pretty aggressive pipeline. And now I've been experimenting, um, with taking all of that context and content and having AI sit in the middle. Um, I'm using, oh God, what model am I using for the, for the blog posts? I think I am using Claude for the blog posts. Uh, I have to go, I don't even remember off the top of my head, but anyway, I've put WordPress in the middle. So my, my, or not in the middle on the, on the, on the front end. Um, and what it'll do is through Cron and as these, all these different apps fire, um, it will take that information and then post it to WordPress. And that's giving, it's allowing me to just to experiment, but it's allowing me to say, Hey, look, if I want to build a front end for all of this content and eventually get a human in the loop, WordPress is actually a great platform for that because now I can generate all of this content through AI posted on WordPress. And because I simply don't trust all of AI yet, and there are inaccuracies happening. How can I give citizens the ability to go in and like Wikipedia style say, Oh right, no, that's, that's the wrong name or that's the wrong street. Or give people editorial access to kind of like own this AI generated news because it is coming and it's going to come at like probably like the national and global level first before it hits like the local markets. And this has been a very interesting, um, experiment because it's, it's interesting to see like what AI chooses as hot topics and it's doing actually a pretty good job, but clearly getting a lot of like the names and like local vocabulary wrong. Um, because I've been relying strictly on, uh, the YouTube transcript. And that's been really cool to see. I have it generate an automatic podcast and it is interesting to see every week listening to my, my week ahead robot. Uh, thanks to 11 labs, tell me what's about to happen. And then at the, every Friday, a weekly recap and listening to a robot go, here's what happened throughout the city on Friday. And I have a friend at the local paper. He's the editor for the local paper. And, um, he's kind of keeping an eye on it. And I'm like, what do you think about this, Dan? He's just like, you're literally building a thing to replace my job. And I'm like, I'm not trying to like, I'm trying to build a system that is going to take all this. This, this is the long way of getting to like why these agents are important. And there's so much shit, so much content that's happening in a business, in a local government that you just don't have the manpower or the time to watch all of it. And this is the major unlock for me anyway, that AI can surface for you. Like at an agency, you might have a meeting for your engineering team that's going to impact your client, but your designers don't know about it. Your project managers don't know about it. And if no one's paying attention, maybe AI can autonomously say, oh, you know, Brendan said he's going to launch a new plugin for this client. The sales team said this client's leaving. Maybe we should warn everybody that says there's a disconnect here. And, you know, no different than in local government. You know, one meeting says this, another meeting says that. No one's paying attention, so nobody knows. So anyway, long way of getting to, I definitely see an advantage for these agents. Yeah. Well, no, that's, I didn't even think about that. That's a very good point. You've, you've, you've told a very compelling story there. I might have to steal that. That was very, very well put there, Matt. Thank you. Yeah. That's, no, that's exactly, that's exactly what we have sort of in our pipeline where all of our meetings get transcribed. We put the original transcript into GitHub and then we put what project it's attached to, what was said, who was there in the meeting. And, you know, basically what was said in the meeting and what, what projects and tasks touched that meeting. Right. And then, you know, it's, it's basically updated every single day at 4 p.m. And, you know, it's, it's our second brain for our company. Right. And that's, that's updated every single day. And it's, it's been crucial moving forward for, you know, making sure that our notion stays up to date and making sure everyone is on the same page because you're exactly right. We, not everyone is in every meeting. Yeah. How do you feed it? I mean, if you can say like, how do you feed it information to learn from? Is it all just like generated by Slack? Is that the catalyst for your Hermes agent to know everything that's happening? Or are you feeding like from all angles? All angles. Yeah. So it gets, it gets Slack context through the Slack API and then it gets Granola meeting notes, which is a meeting note. So every meeting that we're in, someone's running Granola. And so it gets that API access. And then it has an ocean access through that API. So that trifecta is basically all the company information. Yeah. Do you give it like, oh, new contract, new customer contracts? Like, does that, is that how it is customer aware? Or are you not at that level yet? Yeah. I mean, customer, customer information. No. So new projects that come in are put into notion. So that's what we use for projects. It's basically the CRM. You know, my, the agency owner wants to, to give it access to his email, but there's a lot of confidential stuff in there. And I'm like, well, let's hold off on that. Yeah. Or let's figure out some, some way to not give it everything in your email. And then, yeah. So that's, that's the next frontier. Yeah. Yeah. That's stuff that I'm not, you know, willing to give up. And, you know, another advantage of these agents, which I've heard a lot about, and I know is a lot of promise for agency owners is like, boy, wouldn't it be great if it would just go do like every, when anything ever sounds like too good to be true. And it's too good to be true. But I think like a lot of people say, oh, I've got these agents that there's like cold email everybody or cold contact people. And of course, like as a salesperson in my head, I'm like, that's obviously I want that. Give it to me. And, you know, I just want to start doing that. But I just saw a report today. I think it was like 40% of like LinkedIn posts or they just did like a survey or some outlet did a survey where 40% of AI or LinkedIn posts are just AI, you know, slop that these people are just unleashing on LinkedIn. And it's just like, man, when, like, is that the, is that the future of communication? Just more spam and more bots, you know, hitting your inbox? Or is there a way that like the future of communication is contact my agent? If I tell my agent I'm looking for something or my agent knows I have a particular pain point, then the agent lets it through to me. And just have these agents talk to each other. Stop hitting my inbox. Just talk to my agent. And if my agent says, oh, yeah, Matt's got that problem. Lead generation that he's hoping for you to solve. Boom. Boom. Land on his desk. I don't know. That's the hopeful world that I'm looking for. But I think a lot of folks unleashing these agents are just like, you know, taking an easy route that's just not going to pan out for them. Yeah. I mean, I certainly know my inbox is just full of spam. And LinkedIn is not only are the posts a bunch of spam, but the comments are just AI generated as well. I mean, it's, I don't know if there's an end in sight to it. And I can't, I just can't tell what's, people assure me that, oh, this is a human post. And it's like, I don't believe you. So, yeah. Yeah. Man. Yeah. The, yeah, I don't know. I mean, there's a whole different conversation is like trust and content and stuff like that. And one of the things that I'm trying to do with my social experiment is to make it the next thing I'm going to do is have a, an AI rating. Like there's disclaimers everywhere on the site that this is AI generated content. And then if you feel the need to tell me how well it did, you know, you can hit this, you know, ranker, you know, one out of five, you know, between one to five. Like, how did, how did this AI bot do to try to like improve that and like feed that back to the machine? But, yeah, it's a whole new social experiment. Let's just round out the episode talking about WordPress. Have you, is there anything that you're looking ahead to in WordPress world going, they need to do this in order to win? Is there something that you're on the sidelines going, it's getting a little bit better in terms of like the AI adoption in WordPress. But if they do this, like, this is what I need as somebody who lives in the, you know, WordPress space. Is there something that's got you on the hook? Uh, I mean, that's a good question. I think there, you know, there's been, there's been quite a lot of improvements, I guess. I guess 7.0 is new since we've, since we've last spoke. You know, there's, there's quite a lot in there to unpack. Uh, I, I don't know. I was, I was trying to just connect up the, the connect, the generic MCP the other day and took me much longer than I wished. Um, and, and I don't know if that was just because I don't do it enough anymore. Uh, but I, I wish that that was easier to expose the abilities that are available and to get to, you know, just to, to get the abilities API really just. Have that easily available to everyone because that's super powerful stuff, right? I mean, uh, you know, I don't know, like a meta box just had a big release where they have the abilities API. I know that the, uh, you know, I'm sure gravity forms has the abilities API exposed and other form builders have abilities API. The abilities API is great. And I think you still need to have the MCP plugin to, to use those. And, and I, you might need to do other steps to do that, but I just think it's too, it's too cumbersome right now. Perhaps I would, I would like to see that become easier to work with. Um, and to, yeah, just in general. And I think that would, that would help a lot out, uh, in terms of getting agents, uh, working with your, your WordPress site easily. So yeah, I'm one of the, if we're talking about the AI aspect of WordPress. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, right. I'm right there with you. That's, that's a hundred percent mine. Like that's going to be the thing that is figured out next to, um, you know, demystify that MCP setup. We have, uh, abilities in gravity forms. We're just waiting for, it's not publicly available right now, but it'll be by the end of the month. We've been just waiting for this next version of ours to, to go out. But yeah, it's, it's amazing. And I, I, I see a lot of the, the haters, um, especially like the static site builders talking about like, oh, look how fast I can build things with, you know, XYZ, uh, tool and WordPress can't do this. And I sort of chuckle every time I see that. Cause I'm like, well, as soon as WordPress does this, like, I think you're like, as soon as WordPress unlocks, like ease of use of setting up MCP or chipped in core, uh, or even if it's just like a more, um, uh, what do you call it? It's just a recommended plugin where you just click and install the MCP service or they make it part of the abilities or the API page right now. Once they just like figure that part out and then it allows all the developers to have their abilities, like gravity forms or your favorite plugin or whatever. Like we're going to be able to talk in English to the WordPress site and it'll do what we want it to do. So like all of this stuff where everyone's like, oh, Astro does all this. Like you can't, you know, it's so easy for me to just type in codex and build this thing. WordPress is going to do that. On one side, I'm like, when the hell is WordPress going to do this? But as soon as it does, like we're all going to be living in a world where you are just talking and building a WordPress site. I don't know why everyone's like jumping ship because of it or because it's not here yet. It's going to get here. It's just maybe people can't wait or they just want a new tool, but it's going to be a different world, man. When you can just say, create this site, put in this dummy content, install gravity forms, put in dummy entry, gravity form stuff, create this form for me. Install WooCommerce, yada, yada, yada. And yeah, it's like, it's just like, it feels like we're right there, but we're just haven't pushed forward yet. But I'm excited for it when we do have it. And we can do that in command line or, you know, within a terminal locally very easily, I think now. And I think getting that safely done on a VPS, because I think that's probably how the majority of WordPress users are interacting with their sites. So I think that would be, you know, the next unlock. I don't think most people are going to be doing that via SSH. So that would be the next unlock, maybe after that. So, and making sure that it's not just in the hands of hosting companies would probably be good. Because I think that, you know, a lot of hosting companies probably are wanting to monetize that and keep that, you know, which is fine. They can do that, you know, fine. They can do that. I don't care. But, you know, I think it would be good to have that as some feature in core, because I think it's important for WordPress to stay relevant in that front, to keep it somewhat top of mind for people and easier for your average person. Yeah, I just use the app. What's it called? Like the app password to do. Of course, I'm going to forget the name of it. You can set it up inside your inside your user account. And I run that as a local ENV file or in my local environment file. And I can just talk to Claude that way without even like the traditional MCP setup. And it'll just access the content. And like when I need to make big changes of content or create a page or a set of pages or update a privacy page, like it'll just go and do it. And it's just a one-to-one relationship. But, yeah, it's great. I don't know what the hell everyone's complaining about. I know what everybody's complaining about. Brendan, we're going to wrap it up today. We're going to wrap it up today. Thanks for hanging out on the Agency Action Podcast. You've hit every show in the WP Minute stable. You're across all shows. You hold that title. What do I win? Congratulations. Congratulations. I'll put your face above Mark Szymanski. There we go. That's got to count for something. That's got to count for something. Brendan, where do you want folks to go to say thanks? You know, you can find me on YouTube. You can find me on various socials. Brendan O'Connell. Search for that. Slash, I don't know, whatever. Dash WP. I don't know. I'm not the Brendan O'Connell artist. That's all I know. I'm the Brendan O'Connell developer, WordPress extraordinaire, whatever it is, on the various platforms. You've always got some really in-depth video that we all look forward to. Thanks for sharing all the stuff that you do. Everybody else, Agency Action Podcast, part of the WP Minute Network, where every month we've been having member meetups for the last three-ish months. You can join as a free member by taking one of our free courses. Go to the wpminute.com. Click on the courses button. Pick one of our free courses. Join for free. There's a Slack button. You can join the Slack. We want you in there. And then you can meet up with us every month to talk about cool agency stuff. There's always a new topic. Editor-in-Chief Eric Karkovac runs that stuff. So join us for free in the membership in Slack. We'll see you in the next episode. We'll see you in the next episode.