The Automation Rule – what if half your workday was automated? That's where we're headed.
Season 1, Episode 3 of "5 Minutes" – documenting SMOC's journey toward becoming a fully AI-driven company, and our goal of enabling any customer to launch their first AI sales agent in under 5 minutes. Today: my personal automation rule.
There's a lot of talk in the industry about "the one-person unicorn" – companies like Lovable measure revenue per employee in millions of dollars. It's an extreme benchmark, but it tells you something important about what's actually possible with the right automation and structure.
The Automation Rule is simple: whenever I identify an admin or repetitive task, I invest time in setting up an agent for it – instead of just doing it myself. Once I'm happy with the result, I schedule it as a recurring task. And just like that – the task is automated forever.
In practice, I use Claude Cowork every morning. It handles email triage and task management, market analysis and invoice follow-up – all controlled by me, but it easily saves a couple of hours a day. I'm now adding automation around expenses, accounting and board reports. Suddenly, maybe half the day is automated.
It takes a little patience to tune each agent. But the Automation Rule ensures that the task disappears from your daily life permanently. What gets freed up isn't just time – it's the mental capacity to focus on what actually matters: product and customers.
That's also exactly what we're building toward at SMOC – so that our customers don't have to figure this out themselves. One AI sales agent, live in 5 minutes.
Next up: what we're actually building on the product side to get there.
