I Took The Risk.. And It Paid Out (Literally)

I have 6 AI agents running inside my business right now. Some of the names right now are Alfred, Cyborg, Flash, and Oracle, and they do a whole host of things such as looking through my Google Search Console, looking through my CRM, saving me $500 grand plus when it comes to my costs, and doing much more than that. And the number one question I get is, how do you make sure they don't go rogue and blow something up? I'm Eric Siu. I'm the founder of Single Grain, and I can't write a line of code, and I've built a system where I trust my agents, enough to let them touch live deals, live content, and live client work. It took me a while to get here. I made mistakes. I'll show you exactly what I learned. And more importantly, I'm going to show you how you can actually start to hand these agents off to your team so they help you scale much faster. Because the difference between AI that helps your business and AI that embarrasses you in front of a client comes down to one thing: trust infrastructure. So if you actually want to trust an agent and you want it to scale with you, it all comes down to your initial setup. Your agents, for example, I use OpenClaw, and for our clients, we been using Memo Claw, which is the enterprise-grade version. And the most important thing is that you are figuring out, okay, what are the security concerns that you have for your company? What's the right permissioning? Are you going to give everyone permission to make changes to your agents? What level of access are you going to give to your agents? Are you going to give all of your agents access to your credit cards? Are you going to give all of your agents access to your financials? You can't do that, right? And so the infrastructure is really important. So I'll give you an example here with Alfred. Alfred is our chief of staff. So Alfred sits at the very top. And then what happens is you have other agents that report to it. So Flash, which is our content agent, reports to it. Arrow, which is our sales agent, reports to it as well. We have a reporting structure here that works out well because you have a chief of staff that has more of the context, and then it can feed that context when the other agents are calling for it. Now, the other thing too, you can't just give it all your passwords, right? So what we did was we created a password vault where the agents can pull from that. And we also have our Mac Mini. So my Mac Mini, I have local infrastructure here. So my OpenCLaw is run on a Mac Mini. And so that is the— that's the main attack vector, right? That is really important. You have to make sure that you set it correctly up with the sol.md. You want to say what it can, what it can't do. You want it to remember certain things and you can have it do that as well. But the key thing is, one, how are you minimizing the blast radius, right? So if someone hacks you, for example, if you let it send emails from your personal email, well, the blast radius is really big because then it can just send everyone emails and ask for information, right? So you don't want to just let it do whatever it wants and then you want to limit the blast radius. And so for our passwords, we only give it limited passwords for the access to the internet. We don't just let it crawl whatever it wants to crawl, right? For the passwords, the access that we give it, it is very limited. And that way, and for example, the credit cards, we give them virtual credit card so that it can't just burn whatever it wants to burn, right? Because it will make mistakes. It will forget things as well. So you just have to understand that there are no solutions exactly. There are tradeoffs, right? So every bit of autonomy that you decide to give it, additional autonomy, you're going to have additional security risks. So you have to keep that in mind. And that's why when it comes to businesses, we go on Nemo Cloud because it's the enterprise-grade version where you might get the ability to do 3 different things, but you can only do 2 or 3 at once, right? That's one of the key benefits of having something like a Nemo Cloud. So let me give you an example of the agents here. You can see that Oracle, which is the SEO agent, it is making SEO recommendations. It's actually helping with strategic scans. It's helping with not only the recommendations but the execution as well. And you can see Alfred here at the very top, and then Arrow is our sales agent over here. It is handling outbound, it's sourcing pipeline as well, and it's also connecting product qualified leads from the different products that we have. And it's figuring out how engaged are these people based on their engagement, what email should we be sending them to try to get them even more engaged and try to hopefully upsell them and cross-sell them to our other products and services. Cyborg helps us with recruiting. All of these agents, by the way, I'm able to talk with them in Telegram. That's where I want to have maybe more private conversations. And in Slack, when I want to have it collaborate with me or my team, I can have threaded conversation. When you have your team working with them, it's even more useful, right? Then you have to figure out, oh, what permission do you want to give to your team too? Maybe you want to make copies of these agents so they don't customize it to where it's something that you don't want to use anymore, right? And so there's a lot of considerations that you need to have. So I would say that you need to make sure that you're very practical about how you set these up and what the goal of each of these agents are. Because if you just let it YOLO, what's going to end up happening is it could delete your entire code base. And so you want to keep that in mind. Now let me make this a little more tangible for you. So this is Slack right here, and this is my first time seeing this. And actually, our, our producer is on this call watching right now too. So this came in today. I, I actually set this for last week. I was like, hey, do a competitive analysis of all the channels that are doing well right now, like long-form outliers. What are long-form outliers? What's the packaging that we can steal? What are the short-form outliers that we can steal by multiplier, right? So we're looking at, you know, this one is 11.6x on top of what their normal views are for that video, right? So life before versus after. Yeah, I'm like, that's a pretty good package, right? And then this one over here, hard takeoff has started. I'm like, I think I can go deeper on that. Let's see, Alex Hormozi, these are, these are all the ways I failed. So maybe I won't use that one because it's only a 3x over here. But these multipliers are good for me to see. And then I can, I can forward this over to my team, or I can put Alfred into a channel, which Alfred is in a channel, and I can collaborate with them, right? And here's some packaging patterns worth testing before versus after AI. I think we should definitely do that one. Failure vulnerability, tight AI tool roundups. I don't know about tools because it's not necessarily going to drive leads for us. It could drive views and then momentum signals. So Matt Berman, he's got 2 outliers in 7 days. We should definitely take a look at him. Nate Hurk is explaining the cloud code news cycle better than anyone, and he does a really good job with this. But then we need to consider for my business, because we sell products and services, we're not selling necessarily courses or coaching, how we want to go about this. If I'm doing courses and coaching, Then maybe I want to hit every trend. But if I'm talking about this, these use cases for business, then I might want to go longer form and share business use cases, because that is my angle and not other people are doing that. If you want to triple your pipeline, double your revenues without having to cut headcount, you have to check out the revenue agents from SingleBrain. That's singlebrain.com. And within these agents, they'll chat with you, they'll do data polls for you, they'll strategize for you, they'll even handle outbound for you, they'll handle the sequences, they'll handle everything end to end. singlebrain.com, and we'll see you over there. So my point of showing telling you this is Alfred is very much my chief of staff. And I'm going to show you one more example here. I was like, hey, where could we run the Elon algorithm in our company? So I was at the gym earlier. You can see it's 7:35 AM, right? And then as I'm walking to the gym, I was like, hey, is it true for OpenCLAW we can actually use the Cloud Max plan? So I'm trying to save money. So I'm asking all these questions. It's trained on me. It knows what my goals are. It's hooked into, you know, important documents that we have as a company. Watch, I'm going to give you one example here that's not going to give me a lot of risk here. So I said, hey, this AEO conference happened recently. Are you able to crawl through the site and tell me what you think we can apply to Oracle to upgrade the scaffolding? So Oracle is our SEO agent. And this is a conference that happened recently. I know they just published, uh, the slides and the talks yesterday on X. So as an example here, look, Oracle doesn't do these things today— AI citation monitoring. And we, we actually do cover that with ClickFlow, which is our SEO software. But it's saying, hey, you don't have this prompt curve analysis, you don't have this off-site consensus scoring, and then you don't have, you know, these other things. And these, these are the things you should do. You know what I did after this? I just took this, so it crawled all of the decks. I think it looked at the videos as well. I looked at the transcripts at least. I just forwarded this over to my SEO team. I said, hey guys, I think we need to think about adding this scaffolding to Oracle. And I've now cloned that agent for my team to use. And I'll actually show you this as an example, right? So when we're using this for business, check this out over here. This is me forwarding this over here. Okay, so hopefully the team does something about this. Then I just added a clone version of Oracle yesterday. I said, hey, go ahead and introduce yourself. I'm yours, SEO team's own agent, not shared with other departments. I already have all the existing SEO intelligence from day one, not starting from scratch. You can customize me, correct me, tell me your preferences. So I like to call this like a custom Tamagotchi. So those of you that are old enough remember that Tamagotchis were like these little pets back in the day. Think of it like a Pokémon, okay? Like a Pokémon, you got to take care of it, right? You got to feed it. It's got to— it's going to evolve with you over time. I'm cheap. I duplicated this for my team, but it's running on GPT-5.4 because it's running on my API keys. So it's not going to cost me much more money there. And then it'll fall back to Claude Sonnet. You might be wondering right now, well, how do I get into this stuff? Well, you get into this stuff by starting to use it. It's like all the stuff Eric's talking about, like, oh, you're talking about security. Well, where do I go for security? You know what? You pay attention to the action that's happening on X right now because you have all the smartest people talking about their setups, whether it's with some type of Claude, maybe they're setting something up with Claude Code. You have a lot of different options. What I would say is if you're starting out right now, Claude Code or Claude has a lot of different options you can use. You can use Dispatch, you can use Remote Control. You can use Claude Cowork, you can use Claude Skills, then you can use Claude Code as well, if I didn't mention that already. But they're building a lot of infrastructure around that that you can use. Okay, that's maybe more for more beginners. Then if you're willing to accept the risk, you can think about OpenCLaw. There's a reason why OpenCLaw is the fastest growing GitHub project ever. And there's a reason why NVIDIA's Jensen Huang said it is the most important piece of software ever from an open source standpoint. Right. And that's why they created NeMo Claude. They partnered up with OpenCLaw for NeMo Claude, which is the enterprise-grade version. So we do NeMo Claude for our clients on the single brain side. You know, for me, Internally, I just use OpenClaw because I play with it the most. So the key thing is you read up a lot, but that all that reading is not going to help you unless you're playing with this stuff. So look, I'm not going to talk about all the beautiful stuff that's happening. Here's where the agent stuff actually breaks. Keep in mind, memory is still an issue right now, so it's going to forget oftentimes. And here's the cool thing. The cool thing that we're testing right now is we are running cold emails for a company right now. Okay. And the cool thing is I can have one of our agents, it'll connect to our cold emailing tool, our cold email infrastructure, and it'll basically create all these campaigns. It'll look for cold emails, it'll connect to another API, so it'll find all of the emails to go after, and then it'll validate all those email addresses, and then it'll create different sequences as well, and then iterate on those sequences. Now the problem with this is that this thing will break sometimes, okay? So one of the APIs will break, and I was like, hey, like, are you, are you stuck here right now? Like, what's going on exactly? Like, did you get lost over here? And this is 7,000 contacts, okay? Like, this would typically take probably around 2 weeks to get going back in the old days. But this all got done in an afternoon. But what happens here is it breaks. Okay, so sometimes what happens is you have to kick it like an old car. I don't know what you're talking about. It's like, yes you do. And you just link it back to this one over here. So oftentimes it's, oh, I can't do it, I can't do it, I can't do it. It's like, yes you can, yes you can. And you just go back and forth with it, right? Or sometimes they'll say, oh, I can't. I'll share X articles with it. I'll say, hey, do you think we can actually use this to help us grow faster? And I cannot read this right now. I'm like, oh, but you can. It's like, thank you for having the confidence in me, but I can't read it right now. I'm like, but you can. You have the X API. It's like, oh, you're right, I can. So sometimes you need to motivate it a little more. You need to keep these threads in your head. One thing I will call out is there's an open source project that just came out recently called Paperclip. Okay, Paperclip will allow you to manage all your agents. You can set a budget for each of your agents as well. So you can set it up within Claude, you can set it up with OpenClaw. I think I'm actually gonna be trying it out this afternoon. Maybe I'll make a video on it. Drop a comment below if you want to see the video on it. If you're going to have these agents, make sure maybe you have like a private GitHub repo where you have backups, where if everything deletes your agents, you can still go back to it, right? And that's why you don't want to give it open access to sending emails from your accounts. Like I have, maybe I give it read-only access, but even then it's a little dangerous, right? Because you'd be susceptible to prompt injection attacks. So there are definitely risks, but I look at everything as trade-offs, right? And I got this quote from Thomas Sowell: there are no solutions in life, there are only trade-offs. By the way, if you're enjoying this right now, if you want more on AI business and marketing, there's a free newsletter we have with more on this type of stuff, and I think the link is right below. So go get that. By the way, if you want to cut costs on your agent cost— by the way, I spent like $6,000 in token cost this month, and it's probably gonna keep going up, but I was able to cut it down a lot. And by cutting it down a lot, I'm going to show you how to do it in this video. Check it out. And then I'm going to tell you what happens next once you cut it down a lot.