Software That Works While You Do.
Scanning business press, trade outlets, and wire services
An agent is software that works on your behalf — reading information, making decisions, and taking action without a human in the loop. We build agents for every layer of your business: customer-facing interfaces, back-office automation, intelligence gathering, and the infrastructure that connects your tools.
Scout monitors the news cycle so you don't have to — reading current coverage at the intersection of small business operations and taxes, then distilling what actually matters to a sole operator or small contractor. Pick a focus and time frame — Scout reaches across 1,000+ business journals, trade publications, wire services, and industry outlets, pulls what's relevant, and runs it through an AI engine.
Scout produces:
- Five cards. Every run. Always current.
- Dominant themes discussed right now
- Cross-cutting signals
- Operations and cash flow issues
- Concrete actions to take this week
- Tax and compliance items for sole operators
Scout reads small business and tax news. We tune agents to whatever you need.
Every industry has its pulse. We build agents that read it.
- What your competitors are promoting
- Materials and inventory pricing
- Industry forums and trade boards
- Licensing and regulation changes
- Any public relevant platform or data source
- Commodity prices that underpin your industry
Front-End Agents
- Lead Intake Agent Live
- FAQ Support Bot Live
- Quote Request Bot Idle
- Site Navigator Live
A front-end agent is the part of your operation that talks to your customers. These agents live on your website — answering questions, walking prospects through an intake conversation, handling quote requests, and guiding visitors to what they actually need.
Every interaction is powered by Anthropic's Claude, so the conversation is natural, accurate, and based on real information about your business. Not a canned script. Not a menu of pre-programmed options. An agent that reads what your customer writes and responds with genuine information.
Front-end agents we build:
- FAQ support bots — answer specific questions about your services, pricing, and process without routing the prospect through a full intake flow.
- Lead intake agents — qualify prospects, gather requirements, and route to the right service. Described in full on the Chatbots page.
- Quote request agents — gather job details and set expectations before the first call.
- Site navigation assistants — help visitors find what they need without browsing every page on your site.
Back-End Agents
A back-end agent works behind the scenes, completely invisible to your customers. It processes information, makes decisions, and takes action — triggered by events in your business rather than customer interactions.
When a job closes, a document arrives, an email comes in, or a status changes in your system, the agent detects it and responds. It drafts messages, updates records, routes tasks to the right person, and queues follow-up actions — all without waiting for you to notice it happened.
Back-end agents we build:
- Lead follow-up agents — manage your entire follow-up sequence after a prospect makes contact.
- Document processing agents — read incoming invoices, POs, and contracts; extract key data; update your records.
- Email triage agents — sort incoming mail, flag urgent items, and draft responses for your review.
- Job handoff agents — when a job moves from one stage to another, the right people are notified automatically.
- Multi-agent pipelines — complex workflows where multiple agents pass work between each other in sequence.
Intelligence Agents
An intelligence agent runs on a schedule. It goes out, reads the world, and brings back what matters to your business.
Competitor changed their pricing? Market price for a commodity shifted? A permit or regulation in your county was updated? A new review came in? An intelligence agent notices these things and alerts you before you would have found out on your own — or before you would have thought to check.
Intelligence agents we build:
- Competitor price monitors — track what your competitors are charging and alert you to significant changes.
- Commodity and material alerts — fertilizer, concrete, lumber, steel — whatever your business depends on.
- Weather and seasonal agents — frost warnings, drought conditions, and storm systems that affect your work.
- Permit and regulation monitors — track local and state rule changes relevant to your trade.
- Review aggregators — collect reviews across Google, Yelp, and other platforms and surface them in one place.
- Whatever you need to monitor — if the data or information exists online, we can build an agent to monitor it and report back on a schedule you define.
Workflow Automation
A workflow automation agent is the connective tissue of your operation. It listens for events, and when they happen, it takes all the steps a human would otherwise have to remember to take.
Job closes — thank-you email goes out, review request fires three days later, record is updated, 30-day reactivation queued. Lead comes in — intake processed, follow-up sequence scheduled, you get one clean summary. Invoice received — data extracted, matched to the right job, you are flagged if something does not match.
The work that falls through the cracks in most small businesses falls through because it depends on a person remembering to do it. A workflow agent never forgets, never skips a step, and never needs a reminder.
Workflow agents run on any detectable event: a status change, an email arriving, a form submission, a database update, or a scheduled time trigger. We scope the trigger and the action sequence together during the build.
MCP Servers
Server
MCP — the Model Context Protocol — is the layer that lets AI tools connect directly to your existing business systems.
Without MCP, an agent is isolated. It can read what you send it and write what you ask for, but it cannot pull a customer's history from your CRM, check your QuickBooks balance, look up a job in ServiceTitan, or read data from your other business systems. It works only from information that has been explicitly handed to it.
With an MCP server, the agent has direct, controlled access to your systems. When a lead comes in, the agent can check existing customer history. When a follow-up is drafted, the agent can reference the client's actual records. When a price alert fires, the agent can check your current inventory before notifying you.
We build MCP servers for:
- Accounting and invoicing (QuickBooks, FreshBooks, Wave)
- Field service management (ServiceTitan, Jobber, HouseCallPro)
- CRM and customer management (HubSpot, Pipedrive, Zoho)
- Custom internal databases and dashboards we have already built for you
- Any system with an accessible API
What It Costs to Build an Agent
Every agent project starts with a scoped conversation. We ask about your trigger events, your output requirements, and the systems the agent needs to connect to. From that we build a scope and quote it. Starting prices below reflect single-purpose standalone builds. Multi-source or pipeline builds are scoped per project. All agent development is billed at $135/hr.
Workflow Automation
Starting at $4,500
A defined trigger-and-response sequence. Single trigger, defined output actions.
Web Scraping / Research
Starting at $3,500
Reads defined sources on a schedule, extracts relevant data, delivers a summary or alert.
Multi-Agent Pipeline
Starting at $9,000
Two or more agents passing work between each other. More complex scope, more capability.
MCP Server
Starting at $5,000
Connects Claude and your agents directly to an existing business system via the Model Context Protocol.
No website required. An agent can run entirely behind the scenes, embedded in any platform, or on its own hosted URL. If you have an existing site that needs an agent added — we can do that too. It is not a requirement.