Last Thursday, Joey Kercher and I showed a room of Denver business owners how we actually run our companies with AI. Not slides. Two live demos, the real failures, and one assignment everyone could act on the same week. We also gave a first look at HumCrew, the platform we have been building at HummingAgent for service businesses and the trades.
Thanks to Colorado Startup Week and CP Group for the room, and to everyone who sat on those stairs at Denver Place. This is the version of the talk you can read.
The idea behind the talk
You don't replace. You wrap.
Keep the systems you already run. Put AI on top.
The owners most afraid of AI are not afraid of the technology. They are afraid of the migration. The CRM switch that ate a year. The accounting move that broke invoicing for a month. So AI goes in the someday pile. But your phone system stays, and an agent answers the calls that used to hit voicemail. Your CRM stays, and AI chases the follow-ups that fall through it. Your ten years of PDFs stay, and become something your team can actually ask questions of.
What adoption actually looks like
Most businesses will tell you they have adopted AI. What they mean is somebody has ChatGPT open in a browser tab.
That is not adoption. That is like saying you have adopted the internet because you have an email address. Real adoption looks different. The AI is connected to something. It knows your customers, your pricing, your documents. It does work inside your systems instead of answering questions in a window nobody else can see.
If your AI cannot touch anything in your business, it is a very smart stranger giving advice.
Demo one: the first meeting of my day
The first meeting of my day is with an AI agent. We start with the money. It is connected to my bank account and my books: what came in, where spending is against budget, what I can green-light this month. Real numbers, in seconds, before my coffee is done.
Then the day itself. What is on the calendar and what each meeting needs from me. If it is a client sync, what changed since we last talked. If it is a sales demo, who is in the room and what they care about. Which proposals are waiting on me, what in the inbox actually matters, where the team needs a decision. Ten minutes, and I walk into every day already briefed.
We run lean by design. No finance department, no marketing department, no HR. When I left corporate to start this company, that was the scary part. Not the technology. All the functions I had never run. Now AI runs them with me, and we ship more in a week than my old enterprise teams shipped in a quarter.
Demo two: how Joey runs sales
A lead comes in through a website. It gets researched, answered in minutes, followed up with, booked, and turned into a proposal. Joey only touches it at the decision points.
He is not a programmer. That is the point.
The three problems we kept seeing
Working with service businesses, the same three problems came up every time:
- Calls going unanswered while everyone is on a job
- Estimates sitting for days before anyone schedules them
- Owners chasing their crews for updates
HumCrew grew out of that. A customer calls. AI answers and books the estimate. The crew gets notified. The customer knows when someone is coming. That is what we are building for: the work that has to happen while you are busy doing the job.
The assignment
Pick one task that is repetitive, describable, and painful. Put an agent on it this month.
Not a strategy. Not a platform decision. One task. If you own or run a business and AI still feels like something happening to other people, you are not behind. Almost nobody has actually deployed anything yet.
Want help picking the task?
We will look at how your business runs today and tell you which one job an agent should take first, and what it would cost to get it running this month.
Book a discovery callFrequently asked questions
Where and when was the session?
Thursday, September 17, 2026, 4:00 to 5:00 PM, on the Grand Stair at Denver Place, 999 18th Street, Denver, during Colorado Startup Week. It was free and hosted with CP Group.
What does "you don't replace, you wrap" mean?
Keep the phone system, CRM, accounting and documents you already run, and put AI agents on top of them to answer, follow up, check and brief. No migration required.
What were the two live demos?
An agent that reads invoices and checks them against the books, and a sales flow where a website lead is researched, answered, booked and turned into a proposal with a person only at the decision points.
What is HumCrew?
HumCrew is the platform we are building for service businesses and the trades: AI that answers calls, books estimates, notifies crews and keeps customers informed. See humcrew.com.
Frequently Asked Questions
Where and when was the session?
Thursday, September 17, 2026, 4:00 to 5:00 PM, on the Grand Stair at Denver Place, 999 18th Street, Denver, during Colorado Startup Week. It was free and hosted with CP Group.
What does "you don't replace, you wrap" mean?
Keep the phone system, CRM, accounting and documents you already run, and put AI agents on top of them to answer, follow up, check and brief. No migration required.
What were the two live demos?
An agent that reads invoices and checks them against the books, and a sales flow where a website lead is researched, answered, booked and turned into a proposal with a person only at the decision points.
What is HumCrew?
HumCrew is the platform we are building for service businesses and the trades: AI that answers calls, books estimates, notifies crews and keeps customers informed. See humcrew.com.
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Book Operations ReviewAbout Shawn Kercher
Shawn Kercher is the co-founder and CTO of HummingAgent, a Colorado AI automation agency that builds custom AI agents, voice receptionists, Private GPT deployments and workflow automation that clients own. He spent thirteen years as an engineer at Comcast Labs before founding the company, and writes The Humming Agent Brief, a twice-monthly newsletter for business owners.
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