AI Agents & Automation · Chicago & Nationwide
AI agent development in Chicago that does the work, not just the demo
We design, build, and integrate custom AI agents — the kind that answer your customers at 2 a.m., qualify leads before your reps wake up, and run the repetitive back-office steps nobody wants to own. Grounded in your data, connected to your tools, and monitored so they stay accurate instead of drifting into confident nonsense.
- Trained on your knowledge base — not generic answers off the open internet
- Connected to your CRM, calendar, help desk, and database
- Guardrails and human handoff, so it knows when to stop and escalate
- You own the prompts, the code, and the accounts
Book a free AI opportunity audit
Tell us where your team loses hours to repetitive work. We’ll map two or three tasks an agent could take over, with a realistic estimate of the time and money back.
No hype, no obligation. We'll tell you where AI helps and where it doesn't.
The chatbot you already tried
Most “AI” bolted onto a business is a toy
You’ve probably added a chatbot before. It greeted people, answered two questions from a script, and dumped everyone into “let me connect you to a human” the moment a real question came up. It couldn’t see your inventory, book an appointment, or check an order — so it deflected instead of resolving, and your team quietly turned it off.
An AI agent is a different thing. It’s a language model given a job, a set of tools it’s allowed to use, and access to your actual data — so it can look something up, take an action, and follow through, not just talk. The gap between a scripted chatbot and a working agent is the same gap as between an auto-reply and an employee.
The catch is that a badly built agent fails in expensive ways: it invents answers, exposes data it shouldn’t, or takes an action it shouldn’t have. That’s an engineering problem — retrieval, guardrails, testing, and monitoring — and it’s the part most “AI agencies” skip. It’s the part we lead with.
- Answers grounded in your documents, with sources — not guesses
- Permission boundaries, so it only sees and does what it should
- Tested against real conversations before it ever meets a customer
- Logged and monitored, so a wrong answer is caught, not discovered in a review
What we build
Custom AI agents for the jobs that eat your team’s day
We start with the task, not the technology. If a plain form or a rule would do the job, we’ll tell you — and save you the AI budget for where it actually earns its keep.
Customer support agents
Answers your customers’ real questions from your help docs, order system, and policies — resolving the routine 60–70% and handing the rest to a human with the full conversation attached. Web, WhatsApp, SMS, or inside your help desk.
Lead qualification agents
Engages every form fill and website visitor instantly, asks the qualifying questions your reps would, books the meeting on a real calendar, and writes a clean summary into your CRM — so sales only talks to people worth talking to.
AI voice agents
Phone agents that answer, route, book appointments, and capture after-hours calls in a natural voice — so a missed call stops being a lost job. They log every call and escalate anything sensitive to a person.
Internal knowledge assistants
A private agent your staff can ask — “what’s our return policy for a wholesale order?” — that answers from your SOPs, contracts, and wiki, with a citation. Onboards new hires in days instead of quarters, and never leaks to the public web.
Workflow & back-office automation
Agents that read incoming email, extract the data, update the right system, and flag exceptions — invoice intake, order entry, ticket triage, data cleanup. The dull, error-prone steps between two apps that never quite talked to each other.
Content & marketing agents
Drafting agents that turn a brief into first-draft product descriptions, ad variations, or support replies in your brand voice — with a human approving before anything ships. Built to assist your team, not to flood the web with unread filler.
Multi-agent systems
When one job needs several specialists — a router that triages, a researcher that gathers, a writer that drafts, a checker that verifies — we design agents that hand work to each other, with a supervisor that keeps them on task.
RAG & custom knowledge bases
The retrieval layer that makes an agent accurate: we ingest your documents, chunk and embed them, and wire up search so answers come from your material with a source — the difference between “grounded” and “made up.”
AI integration into your site & apps
Already have software? We add AI where it helps — smart search, summarization, classification, an in-app assistant — through the same providers you’d vet yourself: OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, or an open model you host for privacy.
Where it pays off
Industries we’re building agents for
The pattern is always the same: a high volume of repetitive questions or steps, sitting on top of data an agent can be trusted to read.
Home & field services
Answer and book after-hours calls, qualify job requests, and stop letting a busy signal hand the work to the next contractor on the list.
Ecommerce & retail
Order status, returns, sizing, and product questions handled instantly against live catalog and order data — the tickets that swamp support at scale.
Healthcare & clinics
Scheduling, intake, and FAQ handling with a careful eye on privacy and human handoff for anything clinical. Built to assist staff, never to diagnose.
Legal & professional services
Intake qualification, document summarization, and first-line client questions answered from your own matter files — with strict access control.
SaaS & technology
In-product assistants, AI-powered onboarding, and support agents that read your docs and changelog so users get answers without opening a ticket.
B2B & manufacturing
Quote requests, spec lookups, and distributor questions answered from your product data, plus back-office agents that clean up order and invoice entry.
How we build one
From “we should use AI” to something that works in production
Five stages, starting small on purpose. You see a working agent on real data before the budget gets big.
01 · DISCOVERY
Find the right task
We look at where your team loses hours and where customers wait, then pick the one task with the best ratio of volume to risk. Not everything should be an agent, and we’ll say so.
02 · GROUND
Connect your data
We ingest the documents and systems the agent needs, build the retrieval layer, and set the permission boundaries — what it can read, and what it’s never allowed to touch.
03 · BUILD
Agent, tools & guardrails
We write the instructions, connect the tools it’s allowed to use, and put in the guardrails and human-handoff rules — then test it against real past conversations, not a happy-path demo.
04 · PILOT
Launch small, watch closely
It goes live for a slice of traffic with a human reviewing its answers. We tune from real transcripts until accuracy and handoff feel right, then widen the door.
05 · MONITOR
Keep it accurate
Agents drift as your data and products change. We log every interaction, watch for wrong answers and rising costs, and keep it current — with a dashboard you can see, not a black box.
Pricing
What an AI agent actually costs
There are two numbers, and honest pricing separates them. First, the build — designing, grounding, and testing the agent, quoted as a fixed project. Second, the running cost — the model usage (per message or per minute) plus our optional monitoring retainer, which scales with how much the agent is actually used.
What drives the build number: how many systems it connects to, how messy your source data is, and how high the stakes are if it’s wrong. A support agent over clean help docs is quick; an agent that takes actions in your billing system is not.
We scope a pilot first — deliberately small — so you can measure the return before committing to a bigger rollout. If the numbers don’t work, you’ll know after a few thousand dollars, not after a six-figure “transformation.”
$4,000 – $9,000
Starter agent (pilot)
One well-scoped agent — support or lead-qualification — grounded in your docs, on one channel, with human handoff. Live in two to four weeks.
$9,000 – $25,000
Integrated agent
Connected to your CRM, help desk, or database, taking real actions across multiple channels, with testing and a monitoring dashboard. Four to eight weeks.
$25,000+
Multi-agent system
Several agents working together across a full workflow, or an AI feature built into your own product. Scoped in phases so you see working software early.
From $500 / mo
Monitoring & tuning
Optional. We watch accuracy, cost, and handoff rates, keep the knowledge base current, and adjust as your business changes. Cancel anytime — no lock-in.
Ranges reflect typical US market rates for custom AI agent development in 2026; model usage (billed by the provider) is separate and depends on volume. Your build is quoted as a fixed price before we start and only changes if you change the scope. Beware anyone selling a “custom AI agent” for a few hundred dollars flat — that’s a generic chatbot template with your logo on it.
Working with a local team
An AI automation agency in Chicago you can actually sit down with
The AI space is loud, and most of the noise comes from people who’ve never shipped an agent that had to survive a real customer on a bad day. We’re a small River North team that builds and maintains this software — the same people who run our clients’ Google Ads and hand-code their websites — so an AI project here doesn’t get thrown over a wall to a separate offshore shop you never meet.
That matters for AI more than for almost anything else, because the hard part isn’t the first demo — it’s the second month, when your data has changed, an edge case appears, and the agent needs someone who understands it to step in. We build on open, well-supported tooling and the major model providers, so you’re never locked into a black box only we can touch.
We work with companies across Chicagoland — the Loop, West Loop, Fulton Market, Evanston, Naperville, Schaumburg, Oak Brook — and with plenty of clients who’ve never set foot in Illinois. Whether you want to sit across a table in River North or meet on a call, you get the same team building the same way.
AI agent FAQs
The questions everyone asks before they start
What’s the difference between an AI chatbot and an AI agent?
A chatbot follows a script and talks. An agent is given a job, a set of tools it can use, and access to your data — so it can actually do things: look up an order, book an appointment, update a record, and follow through. The practical test is simple: if it can only answer from a fixed menu, it’s a chatbot; if it can take an action on your behalf and reason about what to do next, it’s an agent.
Will the agent make things up or give wrong answers?
Any language model can, which is exactly why how it’s built matters. We ground answers in your actual documents and data through a retrieval layer, so the agent quotes your material with a source instead of guessing. We add guardrails that keep it on-topic, and rules for when it must say “I don’t know” and hand off to a person. Then we test it against real past conversations before launch and monitor it after. You can’t reduce the risk to zero, but you can engineer it down to lower than a tired human on a Friday afternoon — and, unlike the human, every answer is logged.
Do you use ChatGPT, or something else?
We’re not tied to one provider. We build on the best model for the job — usually from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Google — and for clients with strict privacy needs we can run an open model (like Llama) on infrastructure you control, so your data never leaves. Because we keep the agent’s logic separate from the model behind it, we can switch providers if a better or cheaper one appears without rebuilding your agent.
Is my company’s data safe? Will it be used to train AI?
We use the providers’ business and API tiers, which by default do not train their models on your data — a different arrangement from the free consumer apps. Your knowledge base stays in your environment, access is scoped so the agent only sees what it needs, and for regulated or highly sensitive data we can keep the whole thing self-hosted. We’ll walk through exactly where your data lives before we build anything.
How long until an agent is live?
A well-scoped starter agent is usually live for a pilot in two to four weeks. Agents that integrate deeply with your systems and take real actions run four to eight. We deliberately launch small — to a slice of traffic with a human watching — so you get something real in front of customers quickly, rather than waiting a quarter for a big-bang release.
Will this replace my staff?
In our experience it moves them, not out. Agents take the repetitive, after-hours, and first-line volume — the work that burns people out — so your team spends time on the conversations and decisions that actually need a human. Most clients come to us to stop losing leads and drowning in tickets, not to cut headcount. We build in human handoff precisely because the goal is a better-run team, not an empty office.
Do we own the agent, or are we renting it from you?
You own it. The prompts, the code, the knowledge base, and the provider accounts are yours, in your name. Our monitoring retainer is optional and cancellable — plenty of clients take the keys and run the agent themselves. We’d rather you stay because the work is good than because leaving is painful.
Free, no strings
Find out what your account is actually costing you
Send us your Google Ads account, your website, or the repetitive task you wish an AI agent could handle — whichever is costing you the most — and we’ll come back with a short, specific list: what we’d change, in what order, and what we think it’s worth. No slide deck, no discovery call required to get it.
If we look at it and think you’re already in good hands, we’ll tell you that instead. We’d rather lose a pitch than take on work we can’t move the needle on.
- A written breakdown of wasted spend, with the search terms that caused it
- Your real cost per qualified lead — not per form fill
- Which landing pages are killing your conversion rate, and why
- Core Web Vitals and mobile speed scored against your top competitors
- A prioritized fix list you can hand to anyone — including your current agency
Turnaround is usually two to three business days. We’re at 320 W Ohio St in River North if you’d rather do it in person.