Duncan

As some of you know I’m involved in a few different businesses. About a year ago I realised I had to transform Emailmovers - a 20+ year old business with thousands of customers served, a dozen long term employees, sone approaching 20 years of service, and a proven model with millions in revenue. In April 2025 I spotted a tsunami was approaching so I stepped in to lead the business through it. At about 7:10 on Sunday morning I finally pulled the trigger following 18 months of hard work - the new site went live, our agent friendly products and flight deck finally surfaced. I was spending about £100k a year on Google ads and in June the introduction of AI snippets caused 93% of Google searches to result in 0 click so traffic dropped and costs doubled. No new business leads for 3 days (we normally get between 8 and 12 a day). We had had about 25 spam leads over the Tuesday and Wednesday and each time one arrived my hopes were raised then crashed. Then the clouds parted briefly at 11:10 yesterday when we got a genuine, bona fide lead from Gemini. I watched through our flight deck as the agent I had built with the latest models to deal with thousands of these over the next few years suddenly decided to forget everything. But finally after an hour back in the classroom it managed to reply. Then another genuine lead around 1pm

Reshaping a 20+ old business to be AI first is hugely challenging - the need to make decisions to stop the bleed is real whilst the potential to make catastrophic mistakes is never far away.

I would pay more tax on my income if young entrepreneurs paid less. I think that’s fair…. If they do well we all win.

Claude can turn an old flat screen TV with an old Firestick in to something quite awesome - I was using it for YouTube but have got a super little dashboard on the go now.

Small win today: the screen on our office wall that shows what our agents are up to now runs on a Fire TV Stick. Typing a long login token with a TV remote was misery, so a new display gets a one-time 8-digit code instead. Anyone else got a wall screen for their agents?

This solves A LOT of problems - @LunchFlow read only access to UK bank accounts for @GrokBot - owned by @stripe lunchflow.app/?atp=TLwEm2 - would be nice if they sponsored our aidinner.co.uk 😍

RT @Gav_Griffiths: Business idea. I don’t want to subscribe to the New Yorker. I live in Stratford on Avon and subscribe to the Spectator…

Today I gave every scheduled job behind our agents a heartbeat, plus its own tile on the screen on our office wall. If an agent quietly stops, I want to spot it from across the room, not hear about it from a customer. Running agents is mostly plumbing.

As far as I am concerned there is "lean agentic" and there is "bloated agentic" - I think I'm closer to "bloated agentic" but it's difficult to know in advance what's bloat and what isn't.

Spent yesterday writing the spec for how our agents work together at Emailmovers: a directory of who does what, shared team inboxes, and an orchestrator handing out the work. Writing it down first is already showing up the gaps.

I am building up quite a nice army of bots using GrokBot and I must admit they are saving me a lot of time.

I want to launch something in the UK and make everyone in the US wait like we have to wait for them

Loving GrokBot - just a great feel to it - 100%

Grokbot needs a payment card so I created a virtual card on revolut with a $20 max spend and created a gmail account with my card saved and gave it to grokbot to use on its own computer. This is more difficult than it needs to be.

I’d like grokbot to have its own api so that I could build the assistant into software.

I must say - grok is fast - quite a bit faster than claude and chatgpt.