How We Run Our Company with Hermes Agent

We're a software house. Three people, Ostrów Wielkopolski. And an AI agent that's been in every strategic conversation for months.

It's not about generating code. It's not about a chatbot on the website. It's about something I didn't expect from AI – a strategic partner that remembers context, isn't afraid to say "that's a weak idea", and does the research we'd never have time for.

Here's how we actually use Hermes Agent to run Halfbit Studio.

1. Not an Assistant. A Partner.

Most companies use AI as a tool: "write me an email", "summarize this document", "generate an image". We started differently. Hermes got the full context of the company – who we are, what our problems are, what we're not good at, what our goals are. And from that moment on, every conversation happens within that context.

The result? Zero prompting from scratch. When I ask "what should I do with this lead", Hermes already knows we're green at sales, that we're too dependent on a single client, that we're targeting logistics and e-commerce. I don't have to explain it every time.

That's the difference between a tool and a partner. A tool executes a command. A partner understands why the command makes sense. Or doesn't – and then says so outright.

2. What Hermes Actually Does (Concretely)

1. Competitor analysis – 45 pages in a few hours

We told Hermes to do a full competitor analysis. Not "browse their websites". Rather: pull financial data from the company register (KRS), analyze the brands' strategies, break down their PR, sales, content marketing, social proof. Compare them to us. Give recommendations.

Out came a 45-kilobyte document – 8 sections, profiles of 5 companies, comparison matrices, recommendations across 4 time horizons. The kind of thing a consulting agency would spend a week on and charge 15 thousand for.

The key takeaway from the report? "You have the best margins in your bracket, but nobody knows it. You're like a great player who doesn't show up to the games." That one sentence reshaped our priorities for the months that followed.

We packaged this research as a competition-analysis skill – now I can run it again in six months with a single command, without rebuilding the context from scratch.

2. Lead research – from chaos to a pipeline

When we started selling, it was total chaos. A list of companies in Excel, zero prioritization, zero research before reaching out. Hermes got the task: for each company, check what they do, what technical problems they have, who the decision-maker is, and prepare a brief.

It did full research on 24 leads. Each one got a ticket in YouTrack (our management system) with:

• a company profile (industry, size, technology),
• an identified problem (not "they need IT", but something concrete: "they manage 800 shipments a day in Excel"),
• a recommendation for first contact,
• a lead temperature (hot/warm/cold).

The lead-research-brief skill automates this process. You give it a company name – you get a ready-to-use outreach brief.

3. Sales coaching – "don't write like that, nobody will buy it"

This is probably the most important one. We're technical people. When we were about to send our first email to a prospect, I wrote: "Hi, we build technology solutions that support businesses, can we help somehow?"

Hermes replied: "This message sounds like you – no pretending. The problem: it's too generic. 'Technology solutions' sounds like every other company. The reader will think 'spam, delete'."

And it proposed a version that changed only three things:

• "technology solutions" → "custom IT systems for logistics and e-commerce",
• added one concrete fact (8,000 products across 20 channels, automatically),
• "can we help somehow?" → "How do you currently handle your offer and your orders?".

No pushiness. No "book a meeting". I just said what I do, showed that I have results, asked a question. Like chatting over a beer. And it works – because it sounds like a human, not corporate spam.

The most important lesson: Hermes doesn't write for us – it teaches us to write better. After a few rounds like this, you start to see for yourself what's wrong with your own messages.

4. Event monitoring – instead of missing opportunities

We used to find out about conferences after the fact. Now Hermes monitors industry calendars – logistics trade shows, e-commerce meetups, AI conferences. The event-research skill searches a dozen-plus sources, filters events by our criteria (budget, location, industry fit), and gives a recommendation: "Berlin, July 1-2, Open Source Innovation Days + Polish Tech Night, one trip, two events, cost ~1,500 PLN".

I no longer have to remember that E-commerce Warsaw Expo is in April and TransLogistica is in November. Hermes tracks it.

5. Enterprise consulting methodology – built from scratch

When we were considering moving into consulting for larger companies (diagnosing "why is development slow"), Hermes helped us build a whole methodology from scratch: a set of surveys for different groups (execs, engineering, product), a data-gathering process, a hypothesis matrix, a 4-day workshop format. The enterprise-consulting-diagnostics skill contains everything – including the traps ("never suggest layoffs", "the developer survey must be anonymous").

This isn't theorizing. It's a ready-made process we can sell to a company with 500 developers.

3. How It Changes the Company

Decision speed

Before: "we need to analyze the competition" → a week of gathering, a week of writing, and still incomplete.

Now: "do a full competitor report" → 45 pages in 2 hours. Strategic decisions get made faster, because the data is there instantly.

Overcoming weaknesses

We're green at sales. We don't have a marketing person. Hermes fills that gap – not as an executor (it won't send the email for us), but as a coach, researcher, and editor. We get a ready lead brief, a prepared first-contact draft, feedback on our messaging.

It doesn't replace sales skill – it helps build it.

Institutional memory

Companies lose knowledge when people leave. For us, strategic knowledge lives in skills – every process, every analysis, every decision is saved as a reusable skill. A new team member can load halfbit-advisor and in 5 minutes know as much about the company's strategy as I do after months of conversations.

4. What Hermes Does NOT Do (Honestly)

• It doesn't send emails for us. Client contact has to be human.
• It doesn't make decisions. It says "I'd be careful here", but the decision is ours.
• It doesn't replace experience. It suggests a direction, but if you don't have the fundamentals, you won't understand why.
• It isn't infallible. Sometimes the research is incomplete. Sometimes a recommendation is too generic. We treat it as a partner, not an oracle.

5. Where This Is Heading

We're at an early stage. We have 5 business skills. But the direction is clear: from an assistant to the company's operating system.

Imagine:

• New lead → automatic research → ticket in YouTrack with a ready brief → draft of the first email → a follow-up reminder after 4 days.
• Every 2 weeks: event monitoring → a recommendation of which events make sense.
• Every month: competitor review → what changed, what to react to.
• Every quarter: sales pipeline analysis → which leads are dead, where to push harder.

This isn't science fiction. It's just skills + cron jobs. Most of it already works.

6. Who This Makes Sense For

For small companies that:

• don't have the budget for a whole staff of strategy, marketing, and research people,
• have founders who are technical but need a partner for business thinking,
• want to make decisions based on data, not gut feeling,
• understand that AI isn't a replacement for competence – just leverage.

If you run a software house, an agency, a boutique consultancy – it works. You don't need a 50-person team to get research at the level of a big company. You need an agent that knows your context and isn't afraid to tell you the truth.

This article wasn't written by Hermes. It was written by me, based on months of real work with an AI agent that sits in every strategic conversation at Halfbit Studio. But let's be honest – half the insights in this text come from it.

The "Hermes Agent" logo and character artwork come from the Nous Research (hermes-agent) project, available under the MIT license.