The same question, all day
Customers, tenants, leads, vendors — different humans, same five questions. Your team is answering them by hand because templates can't read context.
Conversations
that don't need you.
The 30 emails, the 50 maintenance requests, the 200 'do you have this in stock' messages — they don't need your team's brain, they need a system that talks like your team would. We build AI agents that handle the conversation, in your voice, with judgment that calibrates over time. Escalates the unusual. Closes the routine.
02 / Signals
Five signs you
need an agent.
Agents earn their place when the work is conversation — repeat questions, predictable patterns, but enough nuance that a flat FAQ won't do. If any of these are eating hours, this is the right service.
Leads die in the inbox
Inbound forms come in faster than you can qualify them. The ones with budget walk away before anyone replies. The ones without budget waste your time when you do.
After-hours costs you deals
Half your inbound happens outside business hours. By Monday morning, the prospect has talked to two other vendors. You're answering second.
Internal search is broken
Your team Slacks each other to find the policy, the contract, the SOP, the customer history. The knowledge exists. Finding it is the job.
Tier-1 support is expensive
You're paying a person to answer questions a junior could answer — except the junior would burn out in a week. The volume is real, the work is repetitive, the customer needs an answer in under 5 minutes.
03 / What we ship
Six agent shapes
we ship most often.
Agents are not chatbots. Chatbots follow a script. Agents have a job, tools, and judgment. Below are the six job descriptions we hand them most often. Yours will be specific to your operation.
/01
Lead Qualification Agent
Picks up inbound forms, calls, or chat. Asks the qualifying questions in your voice. Books a meeting with the right person on your team — or routes to a 'not yet' nurture sequence. Tags the lead with everything it learned.
An example
Real estate brokerage 3x'd qualified-meeting volume by qualifying leads inside 60 seconds, 24/7, with no SDR.
Typical inputs
- Your qualifying questions
- ICP criteria + disqualifiers
- Calendar / routing rules
- CRM where leads land
- Web chat widget
- SMS / WhatsApp agent
- Phone agent (voice)
- Email auto-responder
/02
Tenant / Customer Communication Agent
Handles routine tenant or customer messages — maintenance requests, payment questions, scheduling, status checks. Resolves the easy ones in seconds. Escalates the edge cases with full context to a human.
An example
Highlands Ranch property mgmt firm handled 65% of tenant messages with zero human touch, while customer satisfaction went up.
Typical inputs
- Past message history (200+ examples)
- Resolution playbooks
- Escalation triggers
- Tone + voice samples
- Email-thread auto-responder
- SMS conversation agent
- Portal chat agent
- Internal Slack handoff
/03
Internal Search Agent
Your team asks in plain English; the agent answers from your actual documents. Policies, contracts, SOPs, customer files, product specs. Cites the source. Knows what it doesn't know.
An example
Services firm cut 'where is X' Slack messages by 80%. Onboarding ramp time for new hires dropped from 6 weeks to 2.
Typical inputs
- Document repository (Notion, Google Drive, SharePoint, etc.)
- Permissions / access rules
- Update cadence
- Department-specific glossaries
- Slack bot
- Browser extension
- Web app
- Embedded in your existing portal
/04
Support Agent
Tier-1 support for repeat-question categories — billing, returns, status, FAQ. Resolves the 60% that can be resolved without a human. Hands off everything else with full context and the customer's mood read correctly.
An example
SaaS company offloaded 58% of support tickets to the agent. The remaining 42% reached humans faster and with less back-and-forth.
Typical inputs
- Help-center articles
- Past ticket history
- Resolution playbooks
- Ticketing system access
- Helpdesk integration (Zendesk, Intercom, HelpScout)
- Web chat
- Email auto-responder
- Self-service portal upgrade
/05
Outbound Outreach Agent
Personalized first-touch outreach at volume. Researches each account, drafts a real message (not template-merge spam), schedules sends, handles replies. Sounds human because it's actually reading the prospect's website.
An example
B2B services firm booked 14 meetings/mo from outbound after the agent took over from 3 fractional SDRs.
Typical inputs
- ICP definition
- Prospect list or sourcing rules
- Sample of your best outreach
- Calendar to book into
- Email sequence automation
- LinkedIn-DM-style outbound
- CRM-integrated workflow
- Reply-handler agent
/06
Procurement / RFP Agent
Reads the RFP. Pulls answers from your past responses, capabilities deck, product docs. Drafts the response. Flags anything genuinely new. Hands you a 90%-done document instead of a blank page.
An example
Government-contracting firm cut RFP response time from 5 days to 1, while win-rate held steady on a 3x volume increase.
Typical inputs
- Past RFP responses (50+ examples)
- Capability statements
- Pricing playbook
- Compliance + security docs
- Web app for RFP intake
- Word / Google Docs add-in
- Email-triggered workflow
- PDF-out via your branding
04 / How it works
The five stages,
shaped for AI Agents.
Every Sling engagement runs through the same five stages — Assess, Design, Build, Train, Optimize. Here's what that looks like specifically for AI Agents. See the full Framework →
Listen to the conversations
We read 100+ real messages or transcripts. We map the patterns — what's routine, what's nuanced, what escalates. Output: agent job description.
Shape the agent's job
Define the tools, the escalation rules, the voice. Build a working prototype on a slice of real traffic. Show you what it would do before it does.
Deploy with a leash
Production deploy in shadow mode first — the agent drafts, you approve. Trust calibrates. We raise the auto-threshold as confidence grows.
Hand off + escalation
Train your team on what the agent does, what it escalates, how to override. Set up your Slack/CRM handoff. Document the failure modes.
Tune from real conversations
Monthly: review what the agent got wrong, retrain, tighten or loosen the leash. The system gets better at your business every month.
05 / Toolbox
What we typically reach for
when building agents.
Anthropic-first, tool-flexible. We pick what fits your data, your stack, and your team's appetite for new platforms. Nothing here is locked in — if you've already standardized on something else, we work with it.
Primary
Claude (Anthropic)
The brain. Strongest tool-use behavior and refusal handling in the agent space — by a lot.
Primary
MCP servers
How the agent talks to your systems. We build custom MCP servers for your CRM, helpdesk, knowledge base.
Voice
Vapi · Retell · LiveKit
When the agent is a voice — inbound or outbound phone. Phone agents are real now, with the right setup.
Helpdesk
Zendesk · Intercom · HelpScout
Where agent + human handoff happens. We integrate cleanly with what you're already on.
Comms
Twilio · SendGrid · Postmark
SMS, email, the plumbing. We avoid building what the established tools already do well.
Memory
Pinecone · Postgres · pgvector
Where the agent remembers context across conversations. Picked based on volume + privacy posture.
06 / Proof
One shipped example.
A representative engagement. Anonymized industry tag, real-shape metrics. The full case-study library lives at /case-studies.
65% zero-touch resolution
Handles two-thirds of tenant messages end-to-end. Escalates the rest with full context. Customer sat rose, response time fell from hours to seconds.
The shape
- Assess: read 500 tenant messages across a quarter. Mapped 11 message types. Identified that 65% were 6 message types — each fully resolvable from existing SOPs.
- Design: agent job description + escalation rules. Built shadow-mode prototype on a 2-week traffic slice.
- Build: 4-week production build. Agent deployed in shadow mode (drafts to humans) for 2 weeks. Auto-threshold raised category by category.
- Train: 2 sessions for the leasing team. Slack handoff for escalations. Failure-mode playbook documented.
- Optimize: AaaS Pro retainer. Monthly review of escalation patterns. Auto-resolution rate climbed from 38% to 65% in 4 months.
07 / Pricing
Published. Honest.
Quoted in 48 hours.
We publish the range so you can scope before the call. The actual number lands inside that range — we quote it after Discovery, fixed-bid for Projects and MVP Sprints, hourly via AaaS for ongoing.
$5K – $12K
- One agent, one channel (chat or email)
- Shadow-mode deploy
- Source code in your repo
- Best fit for testing the agent shape
$15K – $40K
- Multi-channel agent (chat + email + SMS)
- Escalation + handoff workflows
- Helpdesk + CRM integration
- Most common shape for this service
$1K – $5K / mo
- Lite / Standard / Pro tiers
- Monthly conversation review
- Threshold + escalation tuning
- Pause anytime
08 / FAQ
Common questions
about this service.
What buyers actually ask on Discovery Calls about AI Agents. If yours isn't here, we'll answer it on the call.
A chatbot follows a decision tree you wrote in advance. An agent has tools (it can look things up, write things, send things) and judgment (it can read context, make a call, escalate when unsure). The difference is the same as the difference between an IVR menu and a thoughtful colleague.
09 / Next stepShow us the
Show us the
conversation that's
not getting your attention.
Bring the inbox, the chat queue, the voicemail backlog — whatever's where your team's time is leaking. We'll spend 30 minutes on it. If an agent is the right shape, you'll get a scoped quote in 48 hours.
What this call is
30 min. We learn your operation, scope the work, tell you straight whether AI Agents fits.
What you'll leave with
A scoped quote within 48 hours, or an honest "this isn't us" and a referral to a better fit.
Other services
If the work is mostly internal (not conversational), see Workflow Automation. If you need a real UI around the agent, see Custom Applications.