Everyone wants an AI agent. Most of you need a train.

So, about that question

I'm Matt. I run Digital Marketing Adelaide, a few other digital agencies, and a couple of AI ventures. My wife says I have a Lego habit. What she means is the tinkering: building and pulling apart AI agents and automations is my version of playing with Lego, and I insist it is strictly research. She is not convinced. Either way, I spend a genuinely unreasonable amount of my week helping businesses get more out of their day with automation and AI.

Some weeks that is untangling a spreadsheet held together by hope and one very brave formula. Other weeks it is standing up the front of a room running an AI workshop for a team, talking about ChatGPT and Claude to people who walked in that morning quietly convinced the robots were coming for their jobs.

And almost every single time, someone leans in with the same question. "Matt, can you build me an agent?"

Great question. Often the wrong one. Not because agents are bad, but because half the time what people are describing is a plain automation wearing a cooler jacket. And that, as you are about to see, is very good news.

Train or taxi: the whole thing in one metaphor

An automation is a train. It runs on rails. Same route, same stops, same order, every single time. You do not ask a train to improvise. You tell it to leave at 8:02 and arrive at 8:19, and it does, every day, with no opinions and no drama. Invoices, form responses, follow-up emails, moving data from one system to the next: that is train work. Cheap to run, wildly reliable, and gloriously boring.

An AI agent is a taxi. You climb in, say "take me to the airport," and it works out the route, reads the traffic, and makes decisions on the fly. That flexibility is the whole magic. It is also the whole risk. Give a taxi a vague destination and it will happily take the scenic route, or confidently deliver you to the wrong airport while assuring you it is doing a marvellous job.

If the task is the same every time, you want a train. If it needs judgement and changes shape depending on what you throw at it, you are in taxi country.

How to actually tell which one you need

A quick, honest gut check:

Why I will often talk you out of the agent

Here is the part the internet tends to skip. Agents cost more, behave less predictably, and are harder to trust with the things that actually matter, like your money and your customers. Most businesses that ask me for one need three good automations and a cup of tea.

Start with the boring train and you usually get eighty per cent of the win for twenty per cent of the cost, and none of the 3am "why did it just email every customer twice" surprises.

Where this leaves you

Trains and taxis both get you there. The trick is knowing which one this particular journey needs, and not paying taxi rates for a trip the train does better and more quietly.

We build both. Honestly, most of the value is in gently stopping people from overbuilding. If you are staring at some soul-destroying process in your business thinking "surely a robot can do this," you are probably right. And it is probably a train. Come and tell us about it.