AI agents for business, built around your actual work
We design, build and run AI agents that take repetitive work off your team: answering customers, qualifying leads, and moving documents and records around. They use your tools, follow your rules, and hand off to a person when they should.
The problem
Most teams have a pile of work that's the same every day: the same questions in the inbox, the same forms to read, the same records to update. Doing it by hand may be costing you hours your team could spend on customers. A well-scoped agent can take a big share of that, as long as it's built for one clear job and tested on your real examples.
What an engagement looks like
- Short call. Tell us which work you want off your plate. We'll tell you honestly if an agent is the right tool or if a simpler fixed workflow will do.
- Pick one workflow. We start with one job, the simplest setup that can do it, and add complexity only if it helps.
- Build and test on real examples. The agent runs against your past examples before it touches live work, and it gets a way to check its own output.
- Launch with limits. Payments, refunds, deletions and anything you can't undo wait for a person to approve.
- Run and improve. We watch what it gets wrong, fix it, and decide with you whether to expand.
What we need from you
- Access to the tools the agent will use (inbox, CRM, docs, database), ideally a test copy first
- A handful of real past examples, good and bad
- One person on your side who knows the work and can say what 'done right' looks like
- Your rules: what it may do alone and what needs a yes
What it may not do
- It won't replace judgment calls your team makes today; it handles the repeatable part
- It can get things wrong, so we design for checks and hand-offs, not blind trust
- If the work changes every day with no pattern, an agent may not be worth it, and we'll say so
Agentic workflow orchestration means letting an AI agent decide what to do while your existing workflows decide how it's done. The agent picks the next step and passes the inputs; a fixed workflow runs checks, approvals and payments in the same order every time. You get flexible conversations without giving up control of the process.
FAQ
What does an AI automation agency do?
It designs and builds AI systems that carry out parts of your work. For us that means custom AI agents connected to your tools, with a person reviewing what goes live.
What are custom AI agents?
Software that uses a language model to carry out a task for you, choosing which tools to use and handing back to a person when it can't finish.
Are AI agents always the right answer?
No. For many tasks a simpler fixed workflow is enough, and we'll tell you if that's the case.
Will the agent act without anyone checking?
Not for high-risk steps. Payments, refunds, cancellations and anything you can't undo are set to need a person's approval.
How do we make sure an agent follows our policy?
Don't rely on it remembering the policy. Put the steps that must happen in order, such as checks, approvals and payments, in a regular workflow, and let the agent call that workflow as a tool. The agent handles the conversation and judgment; the workflow keeps the process the same every time.
Should we use a cloud provider's agent platform or build our own?
If you already run on one cloud, its managed agent service is often the shorter path, and major cloud providers shipped new managed agent tooling in October 2026. Build your own loop only when you need something they don't do. We compare the options against your actual stack.
Which AI models do you use?
We work with models from providers such as OpenAI and Anthropic and pick per task, using smaller models where they do the job.
What if the agent I need isn't on this page?
Tell us what you need. Plenty of good agent projects start as a one-line description of an annoying task.
Related
- AI consulting that ends in something that works
- AI agent governance, without the red tape
- An AI agent for customer support that knows when to hand off
- An AI agent that qualifies leads so your team talks to the right ones
- AI document processing for the paperwork nobody wants to type
- AI search over your company's own knowledge
- Fractional CTO services in Los Angeles
- LLM cost optimization: how to cut your AI bill without losing quality
Tell us what you need. Book a short call and we'll tell you honestly whether it's worth building. Or email hello@cto.la.