Eric Siu walks through 12 ways to use Hermes, an AI agent system, for work. He covers building specialist agents for revenue, integrating with Slack and Linear, automating email drafts, and connecting APIs like your CRM and Gong to pull data across your business.
Chapters
Everyone's talking about Hermes right now. I'm going to give you a bunch of insane Hermes business use cases for actually making money or for work. Practical use cases, not just for theater as your personal assistant, but for actual work that will drive revenues. Let's get into it. So the first example I have for you here is the ability to make artifacts whenever you want. So imagine you're communicating with people that you work with. You're going to want to make artifacts for them because you are able to communicate a lot faster with images that are nicely designed in your brand. So for example, on my screen over here, you can see that I have this artifact that I am disseminating to my team just saying, hey guys, we need to stop letting silence become a work queue. We need to basically say, you know, whenever you have a blocker, you're— I'm gonna do X related to Y by Z unless otherwise instructed. Now, instead of just calling everyone into all hands and saying, hey, this is what we're gonna do, this is gonna define kind of the permissioning behind it, the go, the no-go behind it, the approvals required behind it, also some examples. The most important thing with this is that literally we have a design.md file that we can use with this, meaning that— so Google has a design.md GitHub repo that you can pull from and you can make these files whenever you want. Okay, so I can make a carousel, I can make a PDF, I can make case studies, I can do whatever, I can make ads, and it's in the brand guidelines that I want. And I can have different brand guidelines too, depending on what it is that I'm creating. So the whole thing here is that if you can make these different artifacts, these are going to have more staying power with people. And it is a communication tool. And if you're running a business at all, or if you're leading people, if you're managing people, or even if you're working with other people, you want to make sure that you're clearly communicating whatever it is that you mean, because we're all different humans. So that's number one. The other thing is you want to make sure that you're working with your Hermes inside of Slack, because Slack is where work happens. You can use WhatsApp, you can use Telegram maybe for your own stuff. When it comes to working with your team, check this out. So earlier, by the way, I made all these graphs over here using a Design MD file that I showed earlier. So I made all these artifacts and I forwarded them over to myself. Then in this case, I'm using it more for safekeeping so I can pull them up later, like for recording this video. But you can see I pulled these graphs over here. Now guess what? If I'm making artifacts, I can forward them over to a group of people. I can forward to— I can DM them to another person. And Slack is also great because you can work in threaded replies too. So you can have a bunch of messages, you can have them threaded, you can even split them out into different windows as well. And so for me personally, it makes it easy to kind of follow things around and the ability to work multiplayer. When you have these agents talking with individuals on your team or inside of a group situation, you're basically transferring knowledge a lot faster. That means you're going to get work done a lot faster. So the third thing is you got to make sure that you can create individual agents that you can work with. So you can see this is my Hermes over here. And right now I'm redesigning a media kit. Somebody recently, they want to do a media deal with us and asked for the media kit and I don't want to spend too much time on it. So I just dragged our old media kit from maybe 2 years ago and that somebody else made it. I said, hey, just can you pull some some recent numbers from all the other platforms that we have right now and just update the media kit and just make it look nice and use our DesignMD. And then I need to approve this right here. But you can see this is one thread in which it can work in. But not only that, I have all these other things that I built over here where I have like an operating system for a closed loop. I want that— I want to work to continue to move forward, right? And now I have revenue system where I want to work, continue to build pipeline for the team. So there's a lot of things that you can do here using your individual agent. And again, you can have it live inside of Slack, that's one option. And I also have one inside of Telegram as well, right? So you can, you can kind of pick and choose. But some people talk about using Discord. I just think if you're trying to collaborate with your team, if we're talking about business use cases, you want to have it inside of Slack because you can do way more inside of Slack versus like a Telegram, in my opinion. So for number 4, you want to have your Hermes work with a project management product like a Linear. And I like Linear because they have a simple API that you can use, and a lot of people use it for building products. And so the cool thing is I can combine Linear with my Claude. I can combine it with my Claude code, my Codex from OpenAI. And I can also combine it with my agent as well. And then whatever it is that we're working on things, it's going to create a linear file so we can keep things moving over time. And it's going to have me review the linear files, and that way we can keep things moving, right? And then if I combine that with the closed-loop system that we have, that's going to allow us to continue to move these projects forward without me having to check in all the time. And I'll give you number 5 right now. Number 5 is using the /goal command. So /goal is the ability for you to continue to just— if you define a definition of done, the LLM or whatever harness it is that you're using, actually, is going to try to keep working at it until it gets the job done. Okay? So in Codex or using Claude Code, for example, it can do it for a very long time. But you can also use it in Hermes 2, and you can also upgrade the /goal scaffolding in there to have it run longer if you want it to run longer, right? And so I look at just having all these different harnesses running together in tandem, and that ends up being a lot better for you because you could just keep building. And so I literally, I have one screen over here and I have another screen over here. One screen is just for building, and then I have main screen over here and I just keep moving. And I will tell you, it's also for business. If you're using Hermes 2, you absolutely need to have another screen. Or a very long screen to get work done. I just found that very long time ago, I used to have 2 screens maybe when I was in college, and then now I'm just like, wow, I'm no longer in college, very long, far away from college, and I didn't know how much more productive I would be from a work standpoint, right? So it is very important. In fact, my Hermes told me that I'm at least 1.8x times faster based on the types of works that I'm doing. So just keep that in mind. Number 6, you want to use Obsidian for memory. So this is really important because your Hermes isn't going to have the best memory in the world. So you definitely want to upgrade the memory using Toby Luque's QMD. So there's a GitHub repo for that, literally It's the letters QMB. And then if you have Obsidian, then every day there's a daily log, all the decisions that you're making, you're logging it into Obsidian. That way you have Obsidian and that way you have Linear as well. Then you have a closed loop system that continually improves. And there's all this other scaffolding. Imagine that it's almost like every day you're working with this thing, you're constantly upgrading over time. You're upgrading things, you're deleting things, you're removing things, and then ultimately you're deciding what to— things that you want to automate. By the way, if you're enjoying this video right now, you got to check out Single Brain. That's with the B. This is where we build managed revenue agents. Unified by a single brain that lives inside of Slack so the team can talk to it. Basically, these managed revenue agents, it can be from scaling ad creatives, it can be creating cold email infrastructure, it can be running AEO SEO campaigns. Sky is the limit. That's how we think about this. We think about going deep in one area with these institutional agents. And if you want to learn more, just go to seagullbrain.com and we'll see you on the other side. Number 7, you want to tie as many APIs as possible that you actually— for tools that you actually use. For example, Granola API might make sense. Gong API might make sense. HubSpot API, so CRMs, call recorders that you have. Also from a content standpoint, using the X API, using the YouTube API, that all makes a lot of sense because whenever I see something interesting on X, I just shared a link with my Hermes. Hey, how does this help what it is, whatever it is that we're doing right now? And then my Hermes knows my goals, so it's going to help compound that. It's going to say, hey, this is genuinely differentiated, it's novel, here's what I would do exactly so that it's going to help move things forward for you. Or on the YouTube side, instead of having to paste in the transcript every time, I have the YouTube API. Okay. Hey, what do you think about this video? What can we learn from this video over here? So for example, yesterday I watched someone talking about what they're doing from an AI standpoint, how they're recursively improving the products that they have. Literally, I took that and I just added the scaffolding of our closed-loop skill, and basically we can go from there. Number 8, because you have all these APIs now, you want to build a content ingester that can pull in all the content that you're writing. Maybe you're writing on X, maybe you're creating content on YouTube, maybe you are creating all the short-form content, but you want to ingest as much as you can. And then you have a content machine that can then help you decide, hey, what content should we be doubling down on? What's actually performing for you right now? What else is out there in the market right now? What other content are other people creating right now? What have you been talking about in your meetings that would be good content? So maybe it's pulling from your Granola API, and maybe when you're most passionate, the things that you're most passionate about when you're in internal meetings, that's the stuff that should ultimately become content, right? And so if you create a content machine that makes it easier for you to come up with ideas, then it makes it easier for you to make content like this. And so actually working with my Hermes, I said, hey, what's really interesting about the way that we work? And it gave me all the different ideas here, and I'm packaging it into this video for you. So you can make more money. Number 9, if you're open to letting your Hermes draft emails for you, that's good. You have it draft emails for you, don't have it send, right? You have it draft emails for you, and then you could just approve what you want to send. Okay, that's one way if you want to kind of protect it from just YOLOing it on your email, right? The other option is you give it the ability to send, and if you give it the ability to send, then it'll send for you autonomous, and you can have it improve over time using that closed-loop skill that I was talking about. The way I see this is that if you have a revenue agent that, for example, is helping me with my sponsorships, for example, because I don't want to deal with the sponsorships, Or if it's helping me with getting on more customer development calls for one of our softwares, as an example, it actually does that right now. Or if it helps you revive stalled deals, if it helps you revive stalled deals, maybe it finds it, maybe it helps you with trigger-based hiring. Like let's say someone is, you know, one of your ICP fit customers, your targets, maybe they're hiring for a certain role. Okay, that's a trigger. Maybe you should reach out to them, right? So there's a lot of things that you can do with this. So the cool thing with Hermes is that we built these specialist agents. So we have one that handles cold outbound infrastructure, and it handles cold outbound. We have one that will create ad creatives at scale, right? There's all these specialist agents that we have, and then Hermes can manage all these for you and then help you move a lot faster, right? So you become, you know, at my company we talk about becoming an army of one where you can do a lot more as one person because you have all these superpowers now. And that's why Hermes is so important for you to be able to use, not just from a personal standpoint, but from a business standpoint. Now, number 11, you're going to really like number 11 because number 11 saves you a lot of money. So you don't need to necessarily spend on OpenAI tokens or Claude tokens. You can just use OpenAI OAuth. Okay. And then I believe you can still use Claude CLI. You can correct me if I'm wrong there, but I believe you still can. But OpenAI OAuth, you can use that. And so instead of you spending on a bunch of tokens right now, you just spend $200 a month or whatever it is exactly. And then you don't have to spend thousands and thousands of dollars a month because I know I bill up really high. And by moving into Claude CLI and then OpenAI OAuth, it's been really good. And so that brings me to my next point. I got to be on like number 12 right now. But if you have Tailscale, if you have multiple computers running on this stuff, let's say you have a laptop, you have a desktop, you have a mobile device. Well, the cool thing is this This morning, for example, I was having issues with my desktop device and I was working out at the same time. So I was working out while I didn't want to go back to my— I couldn't go back to my desktop, right? So because all my devices are on the same private Tailscale network, I can kind of SSH into any of them, meaning I can connect to any of them privately. And again, it's a private network that I'm in control of and that allows me to control the other devices on the network. And that's pretty cool. And the way I get into other devices when I'm on my iOS device, for example, is I use an app called Termius. And Turbius allows me to command the devices, or if I need to do a gateway restart of Hermes or anything like that, I can do that, right? So basically I can control any of my devices from anywhere in the world on this private network. And that has been a godsend in itself. And I highly recommend that you use both of these products. Then it helps you use your Hermes. You don't need to worry about, oh, my Hermes froze at home. Okay, I can't restart it. Okay, I'm screwed. Nope, you can do it from anywhere in the world. So look, those are what, 12 or 13 different things that you can do with Hermes. These are insane use cases that you can use to make more money. Check it out. Let me know what you think below, and also let me know what else you want me to cover right below.
