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.
Let me be clear about what Kit is and isn't.
Kit IS:
Kit IS NOT:
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.
Here's what a real Monday looks like in our Kit-powered operations:
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.
Kit checks HubSpot for open tasks, overdue tickets, and recent chat activity. Posts a summary to our team chat so everyone knows the priorities.
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.
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.
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.
Kit generates a summary of the day: emails flagged, meetings attended, tasks completed, and anything still outstanding.
Kit posts an evening message to the team chat. Something casual, sometimes funny. Then it goes quiet until tomorrow.
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.
No gatekeeping. Here's what powers Kit:
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.
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.
Real numbers from Kit's first full quarter:
At $100/hour billing rate, that's $34,700 in recovered capacity from a $2,100/year investment.
Missed meetings since Kit started: zero.
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:
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.