Kit isn't a tool we log into. Kit is woven into the fabric of how DigiKat operates.

It monitors our Microsoft Teams channels. It reads our email. It manages our Outlook calendar. It updates our HubSpot CRM. It generates content drafts. It sends meeting reminders. It compiles daily summaries. It even sends a cheerful "good morning" message to the team chat every day — and yes, it's a different message each time.

When I explain Kit to other business owners, I usually get one of two reactions:

• "That sounds like science fiction."
• "Wait — you actually trust AI with your email?"

But first, let me walk you through a typical day in Kit's life.

A Day in the Life of Our AI Employee

Here's what Kit did yesterday. This isn't hypothetical. This is a real Tuesday.

Yesterday: 2 urgent flags. One was an overdue invoice query from a client. The other was a meeting reschedule from a prospect. Both flagged before I touched my phone.

The team loves it. It sets the tone.

9:30 AM — Task Review Kit pulls open HubSpot tasks, checks for overdue tickets, reviews recent Teams activity, and posts a summary: "Here's what's on the radar today." It highlights anything that looks like it's slipping.

9:00 AM — Calendar Agenda Kit reads my Outlook calendar and posts today's meetings to the team chat. Times, attendees, locations, and — crucially — Teams join links for virtual meetings. Everyone knows what's happening without asking.

Every day  — Meeting Reminders Fifteen to thirty minutes before every meeting, Kit sends a reminder to the team chat with the join link. Since implementing this, we haven't missed a single meeting. Not one.

Every day — Teams Monitoring Kit watches for @mentions and questions in our Teams channels. If someone asks Kit a question or mentions it by name, it responds intelligently. If it can help, it does. If it can't, it stays quiet.

This is important: Kit knows when to shut up. It doesn't respond to casual banter. It doesn't interrupt flowing conversations. It responds when it can add value. Silence is a feature, not a bug.

12:00 PM — Midday Email Scan A quick pass for anything urgent that came in during the morning. Flags sent to my Telegram if needed.

3:00 PM — Afternoon Check Another email pass. By now, Kit has handled the monitoring that used to eat 30-45 minutes of someone's day.

5:30 PM — Daily Summary Kit compiles a summary of the day and sends it to me via Telegram. What happened in Teams, any flagged emails, tasks completed, meetings that occurred. It's like having a chief of staff hand you a one-page brief at the end of every day.

6:00 PM — Evening Sign-Off Kit posts a closing message in Teams. Something like: "Solid day, team. See you tomorrow. 🌿"

And then it goes quiet until morning.

The AI Handshake: Where Kit Ends and Humans Begin

Here's where most people get AI wrong. They either think it can do everything (it can't) or that it can't do anything useful (it absolutely can).

I use a framework I call The AI Handshake. It's the boundary between what AI should handle and what humans should handle.

• Email monitoring and triage (reading, categorising, flagging)
• Calendar management (reading, posting, reminding)
• Teams monitoring and simple responses
• CRM data updates and task tracking
• Content first drafts
• Daily operations summaries
• Meeting preparation and reminders
• Routine notifications

• Client relationship decisions
• Strategic planning
• Complex email replies (Kit drafts, humans approve)
• Nuanced conversations
• Creative direction
• Anything involving judgement, taste, or empathy

That's not just a tagline. It's how we operate every day.

The Automation Ladder: How We Built Kit in Stages

We didn't build Kit overnight. We followed what I call the Automation Ladder — automating in order of impact, not ease.

Most businesses start with the flashy stuff: automated email campaigns, chatbots on websites, AI-generated social posts. That's starting at the top of the ladder. It's exciting, but it's unstable because the foundation isn't there.

Here's the order we followed:

Rung 1: Data Quality Before Kit could do anything useful, our data had to be clean. CRM contacts had to be accurate. Calendar entries had to be properly formatted. Email rules had to be consistent. We spent the first two weeks just getting our house in order.

Rung 2: Internal Notifications Kit's first job was simple: tell us things. Email arrived? Tell Mick. Meeting in 15 minutes? Tell the team. Task overdue? Flag it. No AI decision-making. Just notification.

Rung 3: Task Creation and Management Next, Kit started creating tasks in HubSpot based on triggers. New email from a VIP? Create a follow-up task. Meeting completed? Create a notes task. This is where the time savings started to compound.

Rung 4: Intelligent Routing Kit learned which emails need immediate attention versus which can wait. It learned which team chat messages are questions versus casual conversation. It started making triage decisions — not acting on them, but sorting them for humans.

Rung 5: Content and Communication Assistance Only after all the foundation was solid did we let Kit start drafting content, suggesting email replies, and generating reports. This is the stuff people want to start with. But it only works if Rungs 1-4 are solid. The lesson: start boring. Get exciting later.

The Exact Cost Breakdown

I promised transparency, so here it is.

Monthly costs to run Kit:

That's it. Less than $200 a month for an employee that works 12 hours a day, never calls in sick, never takes leave, and handles tasks that used to take 15+ hours of human time per week.

Let me put that in perspective:

• A virtual assistant: $2,000-4,000/month
• A full-time admin hire: $4,500-6,000/month
• Kit: $170/month

The Honest Scorecard: What Works and What Doesn't

Here's where I could write a glowing sales pitch about how Kit is perfect and AI is magical and you should all build one immediately.

I'm not going to do that. Because the truth is more useful than hype.

What Works Brilliantly (9/10 or higher)

Email monitoring and triage — 10/10 Kit never misses an email. It never forgets to check. It flags urgency accurately about 95% of the time. This alone saves me 30 minutes a day.

Calendar management and reminders — 10/10 Zero missed meetings since Kit started. The team loves the automated agenda posts. This is the easiest win in AI automation.

Teams presence and monitoring — 9/10 Kit's team chat presence is genuinely useful. The morning messages set the tone. The monitoring catches questions I'd miss. Occasionally it responds to something it shouldn't, but that's rare.

Daily summaries — 9/10 Having a briefing delivered to my Telegram every evening is a game-changer. I know exactly what happened without asking anyone.

What Works Well (7-8/10)

CRM updates and task tracking — 8/10 Kit handles routine CRM updates well. It occasionally miscategorises a task priority, but the error rate is low enough that the time savings outweigh the corrections.

Content drafting — 7/10 Kit generates solid first drafts. They need human editing — always. The voice isn't quite right without revision. But going from blank page to 80% draft in minutes instead of hours? Worth it.

What Still Needs Work (5-6/10)

Complex email drafting — 6/10 Kit can draft a routine reply. But anything nuanced — sensitive client situations, negotiations, bad news — needs heavy human editing. We've learned to use Kit for drafts, not final copies.

Context understanding — 6/10 Kit sometimes misses the subtext in conversations. A client saying "we're happy to wait" might actually mean "we're frustrated and being polite." Kit takes things at face value. Humans read between the lines.

Edge cases — 5/10 When something unusual happens — an unexpected email format, a calendar invite in a weird timezone, a Teams message with ambiguous intent — Kit can get confused. We've built in human oversight for anything Kit flags as "uncertain."

What Kit Can't Do At All

• Build genuine relationships with clients
• Make strategic business decisions
• Handle emotionally charged situations
• Read a room (literally or figuratively)
• Replace human creativity and judgement

What I've Learned After 6 Months With an AI Employee

Lesson 1: Start with monitoring, not acting. Kit's first job was telling us things, not doing things. That built trust. We gradually gave it more autonomy as we understood its capabilities and limitations.

Lesson 2: The boring stuff creates the most value. Email triage and calendar reminders aren't sexy. But they save more time than any flashy AI feature. Simplicity scales. Complexity dies.

Lesson 3: AI amplifies your existing systems. If your processes are broken, AI will automate broken processes faster. We cleaned up our CRM, email rules, and calendar management BEFORE giving Kit access. Data before dashboards applies here too — clean foundations before smart automation.

Lesson 4: Your team will be skeptical — then dependent. John and Melvin were cautious about Kit at first. Now they'd revolt if we turned it off. The morning messages, the meeting reminders, the daily summaries — these became part of how the team operates.

Lesson 5: Transparency beats perfection. Kit gets things wrong. We're open about that. When Kit flags an email incorrectly or responds to something it shouldn't, we adjust and move on. Perfection isn't the goal. Being better than the manual alternative is the goal.

The Vision: AI Employees as a Service

Here's what I'm building toward — and this is the part that excites me most.

Kit isn't just DigiKat's AI employee. Kit is proof of concept.

Every small-to-medium business I work with has the same problem: they need operational support but can't justify a full-time hire. They need someone to monitor email, manage calendars, keep the CRM updated, send reminders, and compile reports.

What if they could hire an AI employee for $200/month?

Not a chatbot. Not a SaaS tool with "AI-powered" in the tagline. An actual AI team member, customised to their business, integrated into their tools, that shows up every morning and handles the operational load.

That's where DigiKat is headed. We're not just a HubSpot consultancy anymore. We're building the future of work — and we're testing it on ourselves first.

Want to See Kit in Action?

I'm planning a series showing exactly how Kit works — day by day, task by task, with real screenshots and honest assessments.

If you want the behind-the-scenes breakdown of how we built Kit, the exact tech stack, and the playbook for building your own AI employee, drop me a message and I'll send you the details.

Or, if you're a business owner drowning in operational tasks and wondering if AI could help — let's have a conversation. Not a sales pitch. Just an honest chat about what's possible and what isn't.

Because the future of work isn't coming. It's already here.

Mick Goman is the founder of DigiKat, a HubSpot solutions partner that actually runs its business on AI. He's been implementing CRM and automation systems for 15+ years and believes the best technology is the kind you forget is running.