At a glance
WHAT IT’S REALLY ABOUT
Live-built AI agents replacing assistants, tracking competitors, shaping work
- Jacob demos a 12-agent “executive assistant” that automates meeting prep, email/calendar/task workflows, and delivers briefings via preferred channels like Slack.
- He shows a human-in-the-loop follow-up email drafter triggered by meeting transcripts, emphasizing simple prompts plus examples and careful checks for high-stakes communication.
- A competitor pricing tracker scrapes pricing pages on a schedule, summarizes changes, updates a spreadsheet, and alerts Slack only when material differences occur.
- They live-build a Reddit brand tracker that searches weekly mentions, produces a sentiment/use-case report via an LLM, and emails a digest with links for action.
- Jacob argues AI agents are a step-change from “clicking buttons” to “hiring someone,” but today work best as structured workflows with selective autonomy, plus disciplined notification cadences to avoid overload.
IDEAS WORTH REMEMBERING
5 ideasBundle many small agents into a role-based “AI assistant.”
Jacob’s executive assistant is not one monolithic agent but ~12 workflows grouped by calendar, email, and tasks, making it easier to iterate and add use cases as needs emerge.
Meeting prep becomes higher quality when agents combine private and public context.
The briefing generator pulls guest lists, prior emails, past meeting notes, and LinkedIn data, then sends a consolidated Slack briefing 30 minutes before the event.
Keep human review for high-stakes outputs; automate low-stakes monitoring fully.
Jacob uses a simple two-axis rule: AI skill at the task vs consequence of being wrong; competitor tracking can run autonomously, while customer follow-ups remain drafts.
Simple prompts plus 1–3 strong examples often beat long “framework” prompts.
For follow-up drafting, Jacob reports better results with concise instructions and a few voice-matching exemplars, rather than overly elaborate prompt engineering.
Agent workflows improve when they include “should we act?” gating steps.
Before drafting follow-ups, an AI step classifies whether a follow-up is appropriate (no-show, internal meeting, casual catch-up), preventing awkward or noisy automation.
WORDS WORTH SAVING
5 quotesAI agents are still, in my experience, not ready to take on very complex tasks in a totally autonomous way without a human in the loop.
— Jacob Bank
This is gonna be just as an important skill for the next 10 years of our careers as knowing how to make a spreadsheet was for the last 10 years of our careers.
— Jacob Bank
An AI agent is working for you automatically behind the scenes. This is the first time we've achieved a technology that is, like, actually equivalent to hiring someone.
— Jacob Bank
The longer the prompts I make and the more convoluted they become, somehow the worse my output is.
— Jacob Bank
Anytime you find yourself writing weekly in the email subject... that should be an immediate signal, like I should have an agent writing this for me.
— Jacob Bank
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