Take-Home Resource

Build Your First AI Employee

An assistant that finds the right people to pitch, writes to them in your voice, and keeps track of who replied.

AI Skills Unlocked · Free Guide

You already know how to hire. You write a job description, hand over the handbook, give them keys to the building, and check their work for the first week. This is that, except the hire never sleeps and does not need a salary.

The idea

Whether you are pitching a brand, building a content system, chasing new leads, keeping on top of your money, or looking after the clients you already have, the shape of the work is the same. Something has to be found. Something has to be written. Something has to be sent. Something has to be followed up on. It repeats, it eats your evenings, and it is the first thing to slip the week you get busy. That is exactly the work you can hand to someone else.

Three words, then we build

These are the only three words you need, and every one of them maps onto something you already understand about hiring a person.

Agent

the who

A worker with one job. You tell her what she is responsible for and she goes and does the whole task, not just one reply.Like hiring an assistant. The assistant is the agent.

Skill

the what

Your written instructions for one task, in plain English. She follows them the same way every single time, so the work comes out consistent.Like the SOP you hand a new hire on day one.

Connector

the way in

Permission to use one of your tools. Your email, your Drive, your calendar. One connection per tool, set up once.Like giving your assistant keys to the building.

A worker, her instructions, her keys. That is the whole vocabulary, and you can hire her for any part of your business.

You at the centre with agents for marketing, sales, customer care, operations, finance and research — You stay the boss. Each agent has one job. Today you hire one, and you hire her well.

What you will need

A Claude account on a paid plan, so you have Cowork. Pro is about $20 a month. Download Claude for desktop
A free Apify account, so your assistant can go and gather information for you. Create your Apify account
Your Google account, for Drive and Gmail
About an hour, and most of that is her handbook

One note before you start. Everywhere this guide says to talk to your assistant, use Cowork in Claude, not a normal chat. Cowork is the mode that goes and does multi-step work for you. A normal chat will just answer and stop.

1. Open the doors to Google

Your assistant starts out brilliant and completely cut off. It has never seen your calendar, does not know your rates, and cannot open your email. Connecting a tool is how you hand over the keys.

In Claude, go to Settings, then Connectors. Find Gmail and Google Drive and click connect on each. You are already signed in to Google, so it is two clicks and a permission screen.

The Connectors screen in Claude settings — Settings, Connectors. Gmail and Google Drive are the only two you need today.

You did it right if: Gmail and Google Drive both show a checkmark in the Status column.

Only connect what this job needs. You are not opening every door in the building, just the two she uses.

2. Give her a way to go and look

Claude can think and it can write, but on its own it cannot go out and gather information for you. That is what Apify is for.

Apify is a marketplace for web scraping and data extraction, which just means going to a website and pulling the information off it in a form you can actually use. The individual tools that do the pulling are called Actors, and there are thousands of them already built and waiting in the Apify Store: business listings and reviews off Google Maps, Instagram, LinkedIn and TikTok profiles, search results, contact details buried on a company's site. You do not have to learn any of them. Your assistant picks the right Actor for what you asked and runs it.

Make a free account at apify.com. Then go to Settings, then API and Integrations, and copy the API token.

The API tokens screen in Apify settings — Apify, Settings, API and Integrations. Copy the token. You do this once and never come back.

Back in Claude, add the Apify connector and paste the token in. There is a second box called Enabled tools. Paste this exact line into it, or your assistant will not be able to browse:

Enabled tools

actors,docs,apify/rag-web-browser

Pasting the Apify token into Claude — Paste the token, paste the enabled tools line, save. That door is now open for good.

You did it right if: the Apify connector shows Enabled, and you can ask Claude "look up [any company] and tell me what they do" and it comes back with real, current information.

On cost. Apify gives you free monthly credits, which is plenty for a normal week of pitching. If you run hundreds of searches you will eventually need to pay, but you will see it coming.

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