At 9am this morning, before I'd finished my coffee, Kit had already checked my inbox, flagged 2 urgent emails, posted the team's calendar to our group chat, and reminded everyone about a 10am client call.
Total human effort: zero.
Kit isn't a chatbot. Kit isn't a plugin. Kit is our AI team member — an actual operational presence that monitors our Microsoft Teams, scans our email, manages our calendar, tracks our tasks in HubSpot, and sends us daily summaries of everything that matters.
Every HubSpot partner, every digital agency, every consulting firm talks about AI. They slap "AI-powered" on their website and call it innovation.
We don't talk about AI. We employ it.
Kit has been running our operations for months now. I'm going to show you exactly what it does, what it costs, what went wrong, and whether you could build something similar. No gatekeeping. No hype. Just the reality of employing an AI.
Meet Kit: Our AI Team Member (Not a Chatbot)
Let me be clear about what Kit is and isn't.
Kit IS:
- An AI agent that runs continuously in our business operations
- Connected to our Microsoft Teams, Outlook email, calendar, and HubSpot
- Capable of reading, summarising, flagging, drafting, and alerting
- A genuine daily presence our team relies on
- Named, with a personality and communication style
Kit IS NOT:
- A chatbot that answers questions when you ask
- A simple automation or Zapier workflow
- Sentient, creative, or replacing human judgment
- Perfect (more on failures later)
The difference matters. Most "AI tools" in business are reactive — you ask them something, they respond. Kit is proactive. It runs on schedules, monitors channels, and acts without being prompted. It's the difference between having Google and having an assistant.
A Typical Day: What Kit Actually Does (Hour by Hour)
Here's what a real Monday looks like in our Kit-powered operations:
9:00 AM — Morning Kickoff
Kit posts a greeting to our team chat (yes, it has personality — each day is different). Then it runs through today's calendar and posts the full agenda: meeting times, attendees, locations, and Teams meeting links.
9:30 AM — Task Review
Kit checks HubSpot for open tasks, overdue tickets, and recent chat activity. Posts a summary to our team chat so everyone knows the priorities.
9:00 AM – 6:00 PM — Continuous Monitoring
Every 5 minutes during business hours, Kit scans our Teams chat for direct @Kit mentions, questions from the team, and requests it can help with. When someone asks a question Kit can answer, it responds. When it can't, it stays quiet.
Email Monitoring (9am, 12pm, 3pm, 5:30pm)
Kit checks the "to respond" email folder on a schedule. For each email, it assesses urgency, checks if the sender is a VIP, sends alerts for anything urgent, and creates draft replies for routine responses.
Throughout the Day — Meeting Reminders
Every 10 minutes, Kit checks for meetings starting in the next 15-30 minutes. If one's coming up, it posts a reminder to the team chat with the join link. Since Kit started doing this: zero missed meetings.
5:30 PM — Daily Summary
Kit generates a summary of the day: emails flagged, meetings attended, tasks completed, and anything still outstanding.
6:00 PM — Sign Off
Kit posts an evening message to the team chat. Something casual, sometimes funny. Then it goes quiet until tomorrow.
The AI Handshake: What Kit Handles vs. What Humans Handle
This is the framework that makes the whole thing work. I call it the AI Handshake™ — the boundary between what AI should do and what humans must do.
Kit handles (the repeatable, data-heavy, time-sensitive work): Inbox scanning and urgency detection, calendar management and meeting reminders, team notifications and daily summaries, task tracking and status updates, routine draft responses, data monitoring in HubSpot.
Humans handle (the relationship, strategy, and judgment work): Replying to client emails (Kit drafts, we send), making strategic decisions based on Kit's summaries, creative work, proposals, and presentations, anything that requires reading emotional context, all client-facing communication.
The handshake point is clear: Kit does the processing. Humans do the connecting.
Automate the repeatable. Personalise the valuable.
The Exact Tech Stack and Monthly Cost Breakdown
No gatekeeping. Here's what powers Kit:
- AI Language Model (Claude/GPT) — Core reasoning: ~$80/month
- Agent Platform — Orchestration, scheduling, tools: ~$50/month
- Microsoft Graph API — Teams, Calendar, Email: Included in M365
- HubSpot API — Task and CRM data: Included in license
- Telegram Bot — Alerts to phone: Free
- Hosting/Infrastructure — Server time: ~$40/month
- Total: ~$170/month
That's less than $2,100 per year. For context, a part-time VA doing the same tasks would cost $1,500-$3,000/month. A full-time operations coordinator: $55K-$75K/year.
What Went Wrong: Honest Failures and Edge Cases
Failure 1: The Over-Eager Phase — Early Kit responded to everything in Teams. Someone shared a meme? Kit commented. We built smart response logic so silence became the default.
Failure 2: The False Urgent Email — Kit flagged an email as urgent because it contained "deadline" — but it was two months away. We refined urgency detection to consider context, not just keywords.
Failure 3: The Calendar Conflict — Kit sent a reminder for a cancelled meeting that hadn't synced. Now Kit checks status immediately before sending reminders.
Failure 4: The Draft Reply Disaster — Kit drafted a technically correct but tonally robotic reply. All drafts now go through human review. The AI Handshake in action.
What's still not perfect: Kit occasionally misreads sarcasm, complex email threads sometimes get summarised poorly, and vague calendar titles give Kit no context.
The ROI: Hours Saved, Response Times, and the Number That Matters
Real numbers from Kit's first full quarter:
- Email triage: 30 min/day → 0 min (2.5 hours/week saved)
- Calendar management: 15 min/day → 0 min (1.25 hours/week)
- Team updates: 20 min/day → 0 min (1.67 hours/week)
- Task tracking: 15 min/day → 0 min (1.25 hours/week)
- Total: 80 min/day → 0 min = 6.67 hours/week = 347 hours/year
At $100/hour billing rate, that's $34,700 in recovered capacity from a $2,100/year investment.
Missed meetings since Kit started: zero.
Could You Build Your Own? Here's Where to Start
Start with the AI Handshake Assessment: map your daily tasks into two columns — repeatable/data-heavy (AI candidate) vs. relationship/judgment (keep human). The first column is your Kit.
The Minimum Viable AI Employee — build these three capabilities first:
- Automated email triage — AI scans inbox, flags urgent items, sends summary
- Calendar reminders — AI checks calendar, sends reminders before meetings
- Daily summary — AI compiles what happened today into a 5-minute read
We don't talk about AI. We employ it.
Kit isn't our competitive advantage because it's fancy technology. It's our competitive advantage because it gives us back 347 hours a year to spend on what actually matters: helping clients build systems that work.
If you want to see Kit in action or talk about building AI into your operations, let's have a conversation. Not a sales pitch — just two people talking about what's actually possible with AI right now.
