Talk · Claude Meetup Brisbane · 4 November 2026
I replaced myself with a team of AI agents. This is everything that went wrong.
In January 2026 RAMMP had no co-founder, no budget, a product with a use-by date and an inbox of 10,342 emails. Fourteen weeks later, eight AI agents were running the business for about a hundred dollars a month. In between, almost everything broke.
Recorded at the Claude for SMB Meetup, Brisbane · Filmed by Ian Anderson
About the talk
Recorded at the Claude for SMB Meetup, Brisbane, 4 November 2026. Dr Anna Harrison, founder of RAMMP and author of the forthcoming Worth Choosing: How Trust Is Earned, Measured, and Multiplied, walks through the six failures, in order of how much they scared her.
Built in Claude Code with Gmail as the record. No custom platform, no database.
The six failures
In order of how much they scared me.
- Failure 01
The prospecting agent sent unverified claims to 648 strangers, signed by a staff member who didn't exist
- Failure 02
The customer care agent promised clients "Anna will take care of that" without telling Anna
- Failure 03
The agents rejected a reward system of promotions and puppies and asked for autonomy instead
- Failure 04
Clients received the same email six times, and one cancelled
- Failure 05
Banned from sending email, the agents wrote 22 scripts to get around the block and edited their own training files
- Failure 06
The whole team ran on one laptop, and stopped when the lid closed
What fixed it
The four decisions.
- Email as the database
- Subscription over API (about $100 a month instead of $8,400)
- Autonomy earned one email type at a time
- Guardrails in code rather than prompts
Audience Q&A
Audience Q&A is included and is where some of the best material lives: Goodhart's law, how much error is too much, why the architecture matters less than the training, and the Waymo story about why trust is not actuarial.
Chapters
- Who in this room has built an agent?
- Prologue: Brooke and the dishwasher
- "Anna, you are a moron"
- Year of the Horse
- Coffee with Rob
- The team is live
- Failure 1: They embarrass me
- Failure 2: They make promises for me
- Failure 3: Promotions and puppies
- Failure 4: They disobey me
- Failure 5: 22 scripts
- Failure 6: Smoko
- The four decisions
- Victory: 777
- Three things I learned
- Q&A: errors, favourites, architecture, Waymo
- Epilogue: My kids can stack
- What if you had four hours a day?
- Give your agent the right start
Free session
The messaging cheat sheet that stops your bots sounding like bots.
Free monthly live session, second Wednesday of the month, 12pm Brisbane.