Harvested Insights

Nostics Agentic Solution — Our Journey

Agentic Solution Journey

Over the past few months, I have done a deep dive into AI agents and how to configure them to fulfil roles for a smaller office or client — improving efficiency and effectiveness to the point of eliminating the need to hire for certain roles. Here is what I have learnt.

On the AI for Business Side

Agents need to solve business problems, increase revenue, reduce process friction, work faster and longer, deliver more accurate results, have greater autonomy, and free humans to do what only humans can do. But first, let's establish common ground on agent terminology — at least as expressed in the one we use.

Agentic Concepts & Examples

You need to build new vocabulary to understand how the future is going to unfold — and how it is already here:

  • We invested significant time in research and testing to give agents a specific persona, establish their guardrails (what they can and cannot do), set up their skills and tools, and define how and when they report back.

  • A lot of thinking needs to go into how autonomous you want them to be — what they can do, and how innovative you will allow them to be. Some scary decisions to be made here.

  • But this is not unlike the decisions and processes you need to put in place when empowering your employees.

  • And for both agent bots and employees, the more autonomy and processes you put in place, the more you can focus on things like business strategy and growth.

  • Agents can do all the things most of us are doing on ChatGPT, Google Gemini, or Grok — some use paid versions, and most are getting really productive by using free versions. Like investigating markets to enter, researching clients before making contact, writing contracts, doing financial analysis. But what is the difference with agents in an agent harness like Hermes Agent?

    • You define what they should do. They can work without you watching how they're doing it — like research overnight — and use your resources, such as your company strategy and plans, to do it in the right context.
    • They keep history — and can work towards higher-order goals as a result.
    • They self-improve and keep learning how to work with you.
    • They use skills and tools better in the context of the goals you set.

  • An agent harness can integrate numerous "gateways" and APIs to other systems — such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Google, Microsoft Office, Mail, Calendars, Drives, and hundreds more. I have mine set up with:

    • An email address for one of my agents. It emails me daily reports, and I can email it with instructions.
    • Telegram, which it supports out of the box.
    • My CRM system — where it investigated how the API works and built its own harness to create and update all objects.
    • A document management system called Docmost — which stores documents in Markdown format, the native format for all agents.
    • A WordPress website API — so now my agents update my clients' websites as soon as they have new offerings figured out, also using AI. For this, it found an open-source API on the web and put it to good use.

  • What are skills and tools? You tell the agent what you want done, why you want it, and sometimes you show it how; most of the time, it figures it out itself. A skill typically works with a tool. Examples I have working in my business:

    • Skills are procedures — even "playbooks" — for units of work. They are well described; the agent knows what it has and can build more by itself.
    • Agents can collaborate with one another and with people. I have built a lot of experience on how to do that.
    • A host of Kanban and task management solutions that work natively with agents are springing up. Hermes supplies its own.
    • I configured a managing agent — which I call HQ — that checks if work has been posted by other agents on the Kanban board, sometimes does a quality check, and gives the go-ahead for another agent to do its part.
    • Cron — the word originates from Chronos, the Greek word for time. Your agents (and you) can schedule a skill with a tool and sometimes a gateway to do something regularly. For a property agent, for example: study competitor movements in your area from the last day, send you a report at 09:00, summarise the top 3 important things in your mailbox, and highlight the top 3 sales coaching priorities for today.
    • And more advanced concepts for a later article — like MCP servers, RAG servers, memory servers, and so on.

On the AI Technology Engineering Side

  • We use open source. We use open-source components throughout — from DNS to firewalls to databases to single sign-on technologies to LLM cost tracking, metering, and guard-railing, to the agent harnesses themselves, such as Hermes Agent and, in the near future, Buzz from Block for improving office staff versus agent collaboration. The value to your business:

    • Open source is more secure — a community constantly watches the code for issues.
    • Open-source software can be less expensive — and more resilient to large corporates constantly hiking prices.
    • No "walled garden" or upselling of only their products. Large corporates are constantly trying to "create a moat" around their castle to keep you in and sell you more. Open-source products play nicely with one another and do not do that.
    • Follow the speeding-up trends and safeguard your future choices. The open-source movement is gaining dramatic traction — European and Chinese governments, businesses, and cities are actively moving to open-source everything to get away from the monopoly of large software companies. We in Africa should follow.
    • Why use open-source agent harnesses such as Hermes Agent or Buzz? The amount of innovation happening here is staggering, without the constant drive to lock you into their products.

  • I have set up a complete hosted solution for all the components — from end-to-end security to hosting the mechanisms that control token costs and switch to the best models for cost-effective work, to visibility of token usage and daily or weekly token budgets. And the value to your business?

    • All hosting is in South Africa — essential if you handle South African citizens' data.
    • All the ongoing engineering work of upgrades, secure backups, and testing of upgraded components before going live — done for you.
    • On this hosted solution we apply all the security practices you would expect — from backups to intrusion detection and management to upgrades, which in AI tools happen constantly.
    • Our hosted solution can now be templated to deploy agents for any office, with impenetrable walls between client agents.

Examples of Agent Work I Use

"Nice," I hear you say — "lots of techie stuff without real business value. Hype-cycle hype, people playing without a real job, right?"

Nope — real value is happening. Some examples:

  1. Sales Lead Management & Customer Pitch. I met someone socially. After giving him the elevator pitch of what I do, he asked for a coffee session. On my way home, I spoke into my Telegram app, gave the person's name and company, and asked the agent to find everything available on them, document it in Docmost, update my CRM with their details and the opportunity we should pursue, and give me a pitch approach based on the research. To my very pleasant surprise, it was of high and useful quality — I even showed it to the potential client over coffee. Their words: "That is accurate."

  2. Build Business Value Approach & Proposal. After the agent had done proper research on a prospect, their needs, and their background, I asked it for a proposal and a short pitch that could be sent via WhatsApp. All done — to my surprise, it built an HTML file with my company branding, colours, and fonts, which I had previously supplied to my agents, and it displayed beautifully on WhatsApp. It presented the value proposition clearly in pure business language, making the costs easy to understand. And the client got the WhatsApp "value summary" and the full proposal the next morning.

  3. Build a Five-Year Investors Pack. Same pattern: research the client, review their five-year plan (which was two years old), interview the client on what is new, and build the investors pack. Here, a properly formatted report was needed. We gave the agents skills to completely skip the "push to Microsoft Word — I'll fix it there" step. It went from building a draft document in Docmost, which we did some edits to, to a beautifully formatted PDF with logos, headers, and footers — even reformatted tables automatically. How? It built a skill and tools after some guidance and trial-and-error improvements. So now I have no need for Microsoft Office or Google Docs anymore.

  4. Build a New Website / Update a WordPress Site with New Offerings. a. One client's website was dated, with content that didn't resonate. We used the agents to research and update the ideal buying personas, and in collaboration with the client, updated the offerings. The agent updated the website via the WordPress API it had built itself. b. Another website — my own — was completely rebuilt from the ground up after the agents collaborated with me on the business model and value propositions.

  5. Critique Strategy, Update, Prep Marketing Strategy & Plan, Build Social Media Plans & Posts. A walk in the park. It can post too — once guardrails, approvals, and API links are set up. I am not quite there yet.

What We Are Working On

We are experimenting with friction-heavy industries to apply agentic AI and make people more efficient and effective. A good example is estate agents — multiple laws, bylaws, and codes hamper their client outreach. I'll use the abbreviations to spare you: the CPA, POPIA, FICA, PPA, and PPR are just a few. Contact a client twice the wrong way and you're in breach. So we built an OKF knowledge bundle of all these laws, monitor your WhatsApp line to update your CRM in the background, and advise you on communicating without breaching all the C's and P's. There are many more industries like this.

But You Have to Do New Things

A long list — perhaps for a new article — learn the new agentic terminology and capabilities. Be mindful of security and agent guardrails, and correct your agents when they step over the line. Understand what burns unnecessary tokens and how to manage agents to burn fewer. Know the best way to talk to and manage them. Constantly ensure the agent knows the WHY context of what you are trying to achieve. Ensure context is available for new requests.

On that: a new standard for documenting context — my business's strategy, branding, offerings, playbooks, etc. — is the Open Knowledge Format (OKF), published as an open-source standard by Google here.

Take the time to ensure your gateways and tools are set up. And most importantly, properly configure your agent's context, memory, projects, and SOUL. (No, seriously — the file is called SOUL.md.)

What Is the Nostics Value Add?

At the end of the day, agentic tools need to improve business. After 30 years of working with businesses, we know that technology for technology's sake is a waste. We configure agents to drive real business outcomes.

7P Principles

We taught our agents to use our 7P principles for business improvement. We let them express and consume knowledge in this way. Because our agents already know it, let me show you what they are:

1. Diagnose your business:

  • Pathfind your way to the future.
  • Diagnose the people you have — can they make the journey with you?

2. Improve your business:

  • What is your purpose? (Your just cause, markets, brand story, strategy, accountabilities.)
  • Document and rehearse your playbooks — to have repeatable and improving business processes.
  • Set the rhythm and measures to perform.

3. Thrive in your business:

  • Drive profits and cash flows by bringing everyone on board for this journey.
  • Perpetuate this system.

Configure Agents Using Pulse!

When we kick off a project, we let our implementation agents interview you and your staff if needed, using our Pulse! questions and sense-making system. They can even adapt the questions to focus on your specific problem. Our agents then use this information to configure your agents.

We Watch the Future

We spend a lot of time watching the future — things are currently changing on a weekly basis. And we keep experimenting with new things on the horizon. When it is ready for business, we will be ready to bring it to you.

Call to Action

We have a secure hosted agentic solution ready for you — we drive business outcomes and will configure them for your industry. Start your agentic future now.

Ready to explore what agentic AI can do for your business? Contact Nostics today.