The origin. Posted by u/Free_Lead_2704 to r/AI_Agents, spotted 16 October 2026.
What we know. The poster and a cofounder built an open source AI coworker for companies, and the first real deployment of it was for the poster's mother, who runs a wedding venue in southern Italy. The account of her workflow, the hours it took, and how the automation was built comes directly from that post. We have not independently verified it.
A wedding venue in southern Italy ran its entire booking process through a wedding CRM that was ten years old and had no way for outside software to talk to it. According to the poster, that one fact nearly stopped a small automation project before it started. The fix was not a custom script. It was teaching the agent to find its own way in.
Fifteen to twenty inquiries a day, by hand
The poster describes the venue's booking process in detail. A wedding inquiry comes in by email from a couple. The poster's mother creates a lead for it inside the old CRM, then sends back a custom email and a questionnaire. Once the couple replies, she sends a quote through the same CRM, and the two sides go back and forth until a contract is signed.
The poster says she gets an average of 15 to 20 of these inquiries a day, and each one takes her about 20 to 30 minutes depending on how complicated the wedding is. Added up, the poster says this used to take 70 to 80 percent of her week. That is the number that makes the rest of the story worth reading: this was not a side task, it was most of her job.
The CRM had no door, so the agent built one
The obvious first move, and the one the poster says they tried first, was to write scripts that let the agent talk to the old CRM directly. That works, but only for that one CRM, and only until the CRM changes something.
Instead of stopping there, the poster says they built a general skill and command line tool that lets an agent reverse engineer the API of any web app by watching how the app behaves in the browser, rather than relying on documentation that does not exist. They pointed that tool at the ten-year-old wedding CRM to test it. According to the poster, it worked, and worked well enough to surprise them.
With that piece in place, the poster says they wired up an automation, triggered by new email arriving in Gmail. Each new inquiry runs through a set of filters that the agent set for itself, after being shown what a real inquiry from a couple actually looks like. Whatever passes the filters then gets handled by a separate instruction file written for that specific step, rather than one script trying to cover the whole process at once.
Two things to do tomorrow morning
First, if a business process is stuck behind old software with no API, do not assume a one-off script is the only option. The same old booking system, inventory tool, or practice management software shows up across a lot of small businesses that have been running the same way for a decade. A general way to let an agent learn an interface by watching it, rather than being told exactly how to call it, is worth building once rather than rebuilding for every client.
Second, resist automating "the whole workflow" on day one. The poster's team started with the single step that ate the most hours, reading an inquiry and getting the first reply out, and let the agent derive its own filters from real examples of what an inquiry looks like, rather than guessing every email format in advance. A narrow automation built on real inputs is easier to trust than a broad one built on assumptions.