Does My Pet Business Need an AI Agent? Every Fear Answered

Does my pet business need an AI agent? Bella Vasta’s answer is yes, and every fear behind that question gets a straight answer in Episode 475 of Bella In Your Business. Bella walks through all 15 fears pet sitters, dog walkers, and pet care business owners raise about AI agents, from worrying it will delete something that can’t be undone to assuming it’s too expensive, and shows why every one of them is really the same fear: losing control of the ship. An April 2026 Bluevine survey of 942 small business owners found 78% do not fully trust AI to handle lower-level tasks without oversight, and Bella’s own Jump Mastermind members are proof that the oversight is already built into how an agent works. This is part one of a three-part series on AI agents for pet business owners.

Raise your hand if you think an AI agent is going to delete something you can’t get back, email a client something embarrassing with your name on it, spend your money, or break your computer. Bella hears a version of that fear in her DMs every single week, whispered like a confession before she even gets the chance to answer. If you’ve been quietly scared of AI agents in your pet business and talking yourself out of one before you ever try it, this episode is for you. By the end, every single fear gets answered honestly, and you’ll understand exactly why Bella says hire one.

What You’ll Learn in This Episode

Learn why all 15 fears about AI agents fit into just 3 buckets, and how to answer every one of them
Discover the 3 things an AI agent actually does, and does not do, before it ever touches your business
Hear how real Jump Mastermind members use agents for GPS clock-in checks, payroll, and morning inbox triage
Understand the real difference between a GPT that answers and an agent that acts
See why the “it’s too expensive” fear falls apart once you run the numbers through the 30-30-40 method

Why Pet Sitters and Dog Walkers Are Afraid of AI Agents (And Why That Fear Is Backwards)

Bella Vasta breaks down the 15 fears she hears most often from pet sitters, dog walkers, and pet care business owners about AI agents, and shows why every one of them traces back to the same root: fear of losing control of the ship. She explains the three things an agent actually does, and does not do, before it ever touches a client list or a dollar, using real examples from her own Jump Mastermind members, including her own agent, Nova, first introduced in Episode 471. This episode is for any pet business owner who has thought about AI agents and talked themselves out of one before understanding what an agent actually is.

Timestamps

0:00 – Teaser
0:37 – Cold open: the fears everyone raises about AI agents
2:18 – Welcome to Episode 475: part one of a three-part AI agent series
3:37 – Bucket 1: all 15 fears, named out loud
4:45 – Captain of the ship: the real fear underneath all 15 fears
6:36 – The 3 things every AI agent actually does before it touches your business
9:08 – Mistakes, liability, and who’s responsible if an agent screws up
10:21 – Bucket 2: “I’m not technical,” and the door that got easier this year
11:58 – Leia’s GPS clock-in story from Wonder Pups
14:20 – The ChatGPT excuse, the Echo Chamber, and Vicki
16:28 – Bucket 3: “it’s one more thing to manage,” reframed as a hire
19:22 – Why Bella says hire one
21:40 – The messy part: Bella’s own nighttime traffic jam
22:53 – Your homework before the next episode
26:07 – Where to find the show notes

What Every AI Agent Fear for Pet Sitters Really Comes Down To

Every fear about AI agents fits into three buckets. Bucket one: it’s going to do something. It’s going to delete something I can’t get back, email a client something stupid with my name on it, spend my money, or break my computer. Bucket two: it’s not for someone like me. I’m not technical. It’s for big companies with an IT department. I already have automations in my software, isn’t it the same thing? I tried ChatGPT and it gave me crap. It’ll kill the personal touch. Bucket three: it’s one more thing to manage. It’s a fad. I’ll wait till it settles down. It’s probably too expensive.

Underneath all 15 fears is the same real fear: you’re afraid of losing control of the ship. You’re the one mopping the deck at 10 o’clock at night, and something touching your business while you’re not watching feels like handing over the whole wheel.

One of Bella’s Jump Mastermind members put it this way: “I’m kind of afraid to give it access to my stuff because I’m afraid it’s going to mess something up. I think I am just afraid of giving it access to my own systems.” That’s the fear, and it’s a smart instinct. It’s exactly what anyone would feel about a stranger walking into their office.

Here’s the perception switch: you’re not turning something loose in your business. You are onboarding a new hire. You would never hand a brand new employee the company credit card and a full client list on day one. So you don’t hand that to the agent either. Every fear gets answered the way you’d answer it for a new hire, and every one of those 15 fears has the same answer.

The 3 Things an AI Agent Actually Does Before It Touches Your Pet Business

There are three things worth understanding about how an AI agent actually behaves, because most pet business owners are picturing something far scarier than what’s really sitting there.

One: it only sees where you point it. Not your whole computer, not your whole life. One place you choose. So the fear that it’ll delete something you can’t get back doesn’t apply, because it can’t reach that. It’ll break my computer? It’s not there. It’ll get my client list? Only if you hand it the client list, and on day one, you wouldn’t.

Two: it stops and asks before it changes anything. Before it turns something on, before it deletes something, it asks. It cannot move until you click. So the fear that it’ll spend your money doesn’t hold up either. It doesn’t have your card. It doesn’t have your bank login. It has nothing you didn’t hand it.

Three: it writes, and then it parks. Whatever it makes for you sits there until you look at it. Think about a dog sitting at a crosswalk, waiting for you before you cross the street together. Nothing walks out the door on its own. Here’s what that looks like in real life: every time Bella gets her nails done, she opens her drafts folder on her phone. It’s full of replies her agent wrote overnight. She reads them, fixes a word here and there, and hits send, maybe 60 times. The agent wrote it. She sent it. That’s what “it parks” means.

Bella had a real scare this summer. She opened her phone and thought her agent had emailed someone without her say so. Her stomach dropped. Turned out she was reading her drafts folder and thought it was her Sent folder. Nothing had gone anywhere. Will it make mistakes? Yes, so does every human you’ve ever hired. The difference is where the mistake lives: in a draft on your screen, before a client ever sees it. AI is a draft. It can’t decide. You do the deciding. That’s the story of how an agent caught 92 mistakes in three months, covered in full in Episode 472, and every one of those 92 got caught before it ever left the building.

How Real Pet Business Owners Are Already Using AI Agents

The fastest way to understand what an agent actually does is to see it working in a real pet business.

Leia runs Wonder Pups in Florida. She’s in Bella’s Jump Mastermind. Her staff clocks in and out using GPS, and she used to only spot-check it, because checking it properly took a half hour a day she didn’t have. Two hours after her group coaching call on setting up her first agent, she messaged Bella: “Holy sugar honey iced tea, why did I wait so long to try this agent thing?” Now every clock-in gets checked against the GPS every single day. That’s a half hour back a day, two and a half hours a week at five days, and pet sitting businesses don’t run just five days a week.

Vicki runs a big boarding operation with a whole team at Vicki’s Little Rascals. Every morning, she asks her agent for her day and gets it back: what’s due, what’s waiting on her, who needs an answer. A dog person who got tired of being a human doing, instead of being a human being.

One of the women Bella works with is literally a grandmother running a pet care company. She was sick and tired of doing payroll. Now on payroll day, the miles from her scheduling software are already pulled and sitting in a spreadsheet, waiting for her. Nobody lost a job. Her team got a Friday morning back.

These same receipts answer the fears bucket two raises most. Worried an agent will kill the personal touch? The agent never walks a dog. That fear gets its own full episode at Will AI Replace Pet Sitters? My Honest Answer After 4 Years All-In. Already tried ChatGPT and got generic junk back? Run Bella’s diagnostic (information problem or instruction problem?), and it is almost always instruction, because you were typing. It’s exactly why she teaches pet business owners to train AI to challenge you instead of just agreeing with everything you say, and to load it with a real AI brain first. And if you think this is just a fad you can wait out, that excuse already got taken apart in Why Pet Sitting Businesses Are Closing in 2026 (And How AI Decides Who Survives).

Resources Mentioned

Connect with Bella

About Bella Vasta

Bella Vasta is a business consultant, keynote speaker, and the host of Bella In Your Business, one of the longest-running podcasts for pet business owners with over 470 episodes. She built and sold a nationally award-winning pet care company and now helps pet sitters, dog walkers, and pet care business owners grow their companies using strategy, systems, and AI. She is also the host of AI For The Busy Human and has been featured in Forbes, Entrepreneur, Fox News, NPR, and NBC. Bella lives in Scottsdale, Arizona and runs the Jump Mastermind, a community for serious pet business owners who are ready to stop doing everything alone.

Frequently Asked Questions

Does my pet business need an AI agent?

Does my pet business need an AI agent? For most pet sitting and dog walking business owners, yes, especially if you are the one handling scheduling, payroll, client emails, and hiring largely on your own. An AI agent works like an onboarded new hire: it only sees what you point it to, it asks before it changes anything, and it writes and parks its work for your approval instead of acting on its own. The fear of hiring one is almost always the fear of losing control of the ship, and you stay the captain: you decide what it can touch and when it earns more responsibility.

Are AI agents safe for a small pet business?

Yes, when they are set up the way Bella Vasta teaches inside the Jump Mastermind. An agent only sees the one place you point it (never your whole computer or your full client list), and it stops and asks before it changes, sends, or deletes anything. It cannot spend money because it never has your card or bank login unless you hand those over, and it writes drafts that sit and wait for your approval instead of acting on their own. The same onboarding rules you would use for a new employee apply here: one job, watched closely, more responsibility only once it earns it.

Will an AI agent replace my staff or the personal touch?

No. An AI agent does not walk a dog, and it never will. What it does is handle the 10 o’clock at night back office work, like GPS clock-in checks, payroll reports, and inbox triage, so the business owner and their team can get back to the driveway, the leash, and the meet and greet. Pet business owners in Bella’s Jump Mastermind use agents to win back the hours admin was eating, while the relationship with clients and their pets stays exactly where it belongs: with humans. The personal touch was never in the paperwork.

Do I need to be technical to run an AI agent?

No. Bella Vasta built her own agent the hard way, in a terminal, with a developer next to her, and that is genuinely technical. The tools available now do not require any of that, and the barrier that made it feel like something only big companies with an IT department could do has mostly disappeared this year. If you already run a pet sitting or dog walking business on your own, you are already doing the job an office manager, bookkeeper, and marketing person would do at a bigger company, which means you are exactly who this is built for.

What is the difference between ChatGPT and an AI agent?

ChatGPT answers. An AI agent acts. Automations follow a rule you already wrote, which is closer to prompting, while an agent handles things you never wrote a rule for in the first place. Bella Vasta breaks down the full difference, including a real story about an agent catching 92 mistakes in three months, in Episode 472, Custom GPT vs AI Agent for Pet Business Owners.

Full Episode Transcript

Okay, raise your proverbial hand if you think an AI agent is going to delete something that you can’t get back. Keep it up if you think that it’s gonna email a client something stupid, like with your name on it, or spend your money, or break your computer, or some other crazy thing. I’m taking every one of those proverbial hands into account today. Because right now, sitting in my DMs, no joke. Every single week. It like literally comes from a whisper.

It’s like, hey Bella, does my pet sitting business need an agent? I’m really scared about it. Like it sounds so crazy. And then before I can even answer, they’re going on and on and on and talking themselves out of it. Good. Fear is just not understanding information, you guys. So today we’re gonna understand it. Every fear you have about agents out loud at one time. Answered honestly. Okay. And I’m gonna take you through all of it.

And then I’m gonna tell you why I’m gonna say hire one. Yeah, that’s the word we’re gonna use today, hire an agent. And by the end of this, you’re gonna understand. And I’m not the only one saying the fear part out loud. Bluevine surveyed 942 small business owners in April, and 78% said that they still don’t fully trust AI to handle lower level tasks. Without oversight.

But the kicker, it’s it’s those like lower level tasks that are actually the things that would save them the most time. You guys, the thing that we’re most scared to hand off is the thing that is eating up all of our time. I’m Bella Vasta, and this is Bella in your business. This is gonna be part one of a three-part series I’m about to show you. And it’s all gonna be on AI agents for your pet business. Today is the why.

The next episode is gonna be what every job I would hand off to an agent in a pet business, holding nothing back. And then the third one is gonna be how, the wrong ways everyone starts and the five things your agent has to have before you even get going. So strap in, because this is gonna be fun. And I’m pretty sure I’m the only one talking about it in the industry.

I’m not gonna tell you what an agent can do today on purpose, because if you don’t buy the why. Then it’s just a list. So let’s get into it. But before we go too quickly into it, if you have not subscribed to this podcast or left a review, I ask you to do that.

What’s gonna happen is every single time another episode comes up, it’s gonna come up on your logarithm and it’s gonna make it a lot easier for you to find this and be reminded to come back when we publish the next episode and the next episode in this series. So please, Please do it. And if you know anyone else who thinks that AI agents are scary, they’re gonna really get a lot of value from this episode, from this entire series.

And I I hope that you would consider sharing it with them. All right, so bucket one. All right. Every fear about agents I’ve ever heard fits in three buckets. This is the first one. It’s gonna do something, like it’s gonna delete something I can’t get back. It’s gonna email a client something stupid, it’s gonna send my it’s gonna spend my money, it’s gonna break my computer. I’ll get into my client list. It’ll make mistakes, and if it screws up, who’s responsible? Me? Bucket two.

Like tell me what one you’re in here, right? It’s not for someone like me. I’m not technical. This is the bucket I used to be in. It’s for big companies with an IT department. I already have automations in my software. Isn’t it the same thing? I’ve tried ChatGPT and it gave me crap. Like the big one. It’ll kill the personal touch. And personal touch is my business. Or bucket number three. Not now. It’s one more thing to manage. It’s a fad.

I’ll wait till it settles down. It’s probably too expensive. 15 fears. We’re gonna go through all 15. But first, I wanted to name a real one underneath all of them because it’s something that I see every single time. You’re afraid of losing control of the ship. That’s what this all boils down to. It just appears in different ways. Is this resonating with you?

You’re the one mopping the deck at 10 o’clock at night, and something touching your business while you’re not watching, that feels like you’re handing over the whole wheel. I told you back in episode 471 that my own agent stays on top deck looking for icebergs, and she does not mop the deck. Her name is Nova. Today is it’s about you, a captain of. Looks for the icebergs. A captain does not mop. You cannot steer and mop at the same time. And right now you’re trying to.

And every one of those 15 fears has the same answer. It’s an answer you already know because you have hired humans. You’re not turning something loose in your business. You are onboarding a new hire. Okay? You would never hand a brand new employee the company credit card. And a full client list on day one, right? So we’re not handing that to the agent either. And I need you to understand that. That’s the whole episode.

Every fear answered in the way you’d answer it for a new hire. And we’re already in kindergarten with this. Even the experts. Nobody is behind. All right, let’s do bucket number one. I’m afraid it’s gonna mess something up. One of my mastermind members actually said this last month. And I want you to read her actual words. I pulled it from the transcript because I want you to understand that like You’re so much similar than you are different.

She said, quote, I’m kind of afraid to give it access to my stuff because I’m afraid it’s going to mess something up. I think I am just afraid of giving it access to my own systems. That’s the fear. And it’s a smart instinct. It’s exactly what you’d feel about a stranger walking into your office. So here’s what I told her: it’s not going to do anything you don’t tell it to do.

And I want you to know three things about how these actually behave because I think you’re picturing something way scarier than what’s really sitting there. One, it only sees where you point it. Okay. Not your whole computer, not your whole life. One place that you choose. So it’ll delete something I can’t get back. It can’t reach that. It’ll break my computer. It’s not there. It’ll get my client list only if you hand it the client list. And on day one. I wouldn’t recommend doing that.

Number two, it stops and asks before it changes anything. Okay. Before it turns on something, before it deletes something, it asks you. It cannot move until you click. So it’ll spend my money with what it doesn’t have your card. It doesn’t have your bank login. It has nothing that you didn’t hand it. And number three, it writes and then it parks. Whatever you make. It whatever it makes for you, it sits there until you look at it.

Think about like you are approaching a crosswalk or a a street and the dog sits on the sidewalk and waits for you to know that we can cross the street together. It’s the same thing. Nothing walks out the door on its own. Now, do you have those set up properly or correctly? Yes. Is it something I can teach you properly in a podcast episode? No. It’s exactly what we do inside the mastermind. Hands-on. With me watching your screen.

I do like free 20-minute coaching sessions on Zoom with everyone in there every single month. And what I want you to walk out of here today with is this the scary version that’s in your head where it runs loose in your business overnight. That’s not the thing. That’s not what’s sitting there. Let me show you how it actually feels like. Every time I get my nails done, I open up my drafts folder on my phone at the salon. And it’s full. Replies my agent wrote overnight.

I read them, I fix a word here and there, and I hit send, send, send, like 60 times. She wrote it, I sent it. That’s what parks it means in real life. And to be honest, I had a scare this summer. I opened up my phone and I thought my agent had emailed someone without me saying so. My stomach dropped. Turned out it drafted it. It was a draft that I was reading. I was reading my drafts folder and I thought it was my Sent folder.

Nothing had gone anywhere. I just couldn’t read my own phone. It’ll make mistakes. Yes, it will. So doesn’t every human that you’ve ever hired. The difference is where the mistakes live. It lives in a draft on your screen before a client ever sees it. AI is a draft. It can’t decide. You do the deciding. It’s the 10 in the 90-10 rule that I always talk about. AI does 90%, you do the 10%.

Want this story of how an agent caught 92 mistakes for me in three months? If you go back to episode 472, one of them, every one of them got caught before it ever left my building. And so who’s responsible if it screws up? You are. So same like when if a sitter were to screw up. Which is exactly why you don’t hand over the keys to the kingdom in the first day.

You give it one job, you watch it, and then it gets more when it earns more. You decide that. It never decides that for itself. You guys, this whole thing is a perception change. And that’s what I’m here to do. That’s bucket one. Detail or sorry, delete, email, spend, break, client list, mistakes, liability. Every one of those hands is down. Bucket two? That’s where we get personal. But real quick, because I know some of you are going, okay, Bella, fine. Safer than I thought.

But which of my jobs, where would I even start? That’s what my free 20-minute call is for. Jumpconsulting.net forward slash 20. I love talking about AI. You can get on a call with me and you can tell me what your week actually looks like. And I’ll point at one thing I’d hand the agent first and how to do it. 20 minutes, jumpconsulting.net forward slash 20. Grab that spot. And let’s keep going. but Bella, I’m not technical.

You guys, I built mine the hard way in a terminal. That is technical and crazy. With my developer friend next to me. You don’t have to. The door got way easier. And that’s why I’m talking about it and teaching it in the mastermind this month. It’s the only difference between my setup and yours. One of my members typed in the chat last week: the word code scares people. Yes, yes, it does. And the word agent. Also scares people.

And once you actually see one, you’re gonna say, wait, that that’s it? I can do that. Because none of this is technical. It’s all a perception turn. It’s the whole barrier. That’s for big companies. Flip it. Big companies already have an office manager, a bookkeeper, a marketing person. You have you. The agent is how a small operator finally gets the office back. And if you’re thinking, Bella, I’m too small. I only have 12 clients. Well, the smaller you are, the more you are the back office.

This is for you first. Here’s a real one. Leia, okay. Wonder Pups, out in Florida. She’s in my mastermind. Pet sitting, dog walking. And last week she said it to me, quoting her exactly, Okay, so first, holy sugar honey iced tea. Why did I wait so long to try this agent thing? That was Two hours after I got off my group coaching call of showing people how to set up their first agent step by step. Okay. Her staff clocks in and out using GPS.

She used it to spot check it because she’s been checking because checking it right took a half hour a day she doesn’t have. So then they were spot checking it, right? But now it gets checked every day, every clock in against the GPS, every single day. Something she couldn’t afford to do is now all done daily. Big company stuff. Please, that one owner is getting a half hour back a day.

That’s two and a half hours a week, if it’s just five days a week, but we all know it’s seven. I already have automations. Isn’t it the same thing? No, automations follow a rule that you already wrote. An eight that’s kind of like a prompting, right? An agent handles things that you never wrote a rule for. Like I said, go back to episode 472. A GPT answers, an agent acts. If you’re fuzzy on the difference, go there. That whole episode, it will explain the difference.

What about, it’ll kill the personal touch? I see this everywhere in every single Facebook group. And it just shows me how ignorant, meaning ignoring the information, I’m not dogging anybody, that they just don’t understand the concept if they think it’s gonna kill the personal touch. I know, because I did an entire episode on this exact fear. Will AI replace pet sitters? It’s episode 470. Go listen. Today, one line I’m gonna sum it up. The agent does not walk a dog ever, ever, ever, ever.

It does the 10 o’clock back office so you can get back to the driveway, the leash, the meet and greet. People come to you and your team. Your team gets a boss who’s not fried and frazzled and scatterbrained. One of the women I work for, she’s literally a grandmother running a pet care company. She was sick and tired of doing payroll. Now on payroll day, the miles in the payroll report are already pulled out of her scheduling software.

And sitting in a spreadsheet waiting for her, nobody lost a job. Her team got a Friday morning back. What about the excuse? I tried ChatGPT and it gave me crap. Yeah, me too, girl. Me too. Okay, information problem or instruction problem. Because I bet you were typing it. Never ever ever type into AI. You’ll get crap AI back. I will die on that hill. And two more things: ChatGPT is trained to agree with you and then give you 12 other things that you can do.

In episode 434, train AI to challenge you. That’s what I talked about. And you probably never loaded it with you. That’s the AI brain, episode 468. Are you guys getting my drift right now? If you have not gone back and listened to the previous episodes, It would be really helpful if you really want to understand AI in the pet industry. Because I’ve been doing this every single episode for over a year. An agent with no brain is a new hire that you didn’t onboard.

And you would never blame a new hire for that, right? Again, perception switch. One more example: Vicki. She runs a big boarding operation with a whole team. Vicki’s rascal, Vic Vicki’s Little Rascals. That’s her company. Every morning she asks her agent. For her day and she gets it. What’s due? What’s waiting on her? Who needs an answer? A dog person who got tired of being a human instead of doing instead of being a human doing instead of being a human being. Okay.

And this one, it gets me a little fired up. There are companies right now selling AI automation for a monthly fee. And everything that they do, you could do. They are preying on the fact that you’re gonna be afraid of an agent. Your fear is someone else’s business model. And I’m here to cut through all that noise and be like and empower you and say you can do it. In the other episodes, I talked about just go to the apple tree.

And what I mean by that is go to understand how to pick an apple off of a tree. And then you don’t have to go to the grocery store and get it concentrated with a whole bunch of extra chemicals in it, wrapped in a plastic bottle that’s like diluted down. Go to the tree and get the real thing. Go to ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok. Claude, whatever it is that your poison is, okay? It’s just one more thing to manage. Stop calling it a thing.

Call it a hire. That’s the perception switch that you need to change in your head. It’s not a thing, it’s a hire. You’d spend weeks onboarding a human, right? And for some reason with AI, we just think that it’s gonna just work perfectly and we’re not gonna have to train it. But you do. You have to train it and you have to give it the same kind of runway, okay? A few weeks of onboarding buys you every week after it.

We live in a microwave society, but our life and our business is not microwave. And tweaking is always gonna be a part of it. I still tweak it. In fact, when I realize that like some of my routines or my tasks are maybe they fell apart or they were wrong, I ask Nova, my agent, to figure out what went wrong and let’s let’s upgrade you. Where where was that crack and let’s patch it so that it doesn’t keep happening again? Cause what’s the definition of insanity?

Doing the same thing over and over, hop hoping for a different result. The first pass, it’s like pizza dough, right? And I’ve talked about this too. You have to roll it out, and then you flip it over, and then you roll it out another way. Okay. That’s what this is all about. It’s just rolling out the pizza dough. Then other people also say, it’s a fad. I’ll wait until it settles down. Yeah, okay.

BlackBerry was one of the most well known phones in business until it wasn’t. Blockbuster, Yahoo was a search engine too. It’s 2026. We do not use Blockbuster. I did a whole episode in April on why pet sitting businesses are closing this year and how AI decides who survives. That was episode 467. And I stand by every single word. If you didn’t hear that, that’s really gonna light a fire under your pants. Nobody’s behind, but the window where being early actually counts. It’s open right now.

I don’t know how else to say it or how much more to like shout it out. My podcast producer’s probably gonna be like, you need to lower your voice. The window is not gonna stay open forever. You have such a beautiful opportunity right now to jump in before it’s like everyone uses a cell phone, like kind of adaptation. Okay, it’s never gonna be as dumb as it is right now. And here’s another one, it’s too expensive.

You pay for it like software, a monthly subscription, same as your scheduling software. Now compare it to what one hour of you at 10 o’clock at night is actually worth. Then compare it to hiring a part-time office person. Run it through the 30-30-40 method that I’ve taught you. Like, I’ll wait. Guys, even the $200 monthly plans are still way cheaper than any office manager or your time.

Even if you only valued your time at $50 an hour, AI most certainly can take care of four hours of work a month. And I’ll figure it out later. You guys, that’s hope, and hope ain’t a strategy. That’s all 15 fears right there. 15 answers. Now, let me tell you why I say hire one. You’ve been hiring advisors, maybe coaches. You’ve been hiring office managers, pet sitters, marketing people, social media people. Today you hire your first employee. For two years, ChatGPT has been your advisor.

It tells you what to do and it’s good at it. An agent goes and does it. Okay. It’s just chatting in another window. That’s all it is. It’s this, you’re doing the same exact behavior. It’s just in a different window where I say it’s like a car that that has gas in it that can drive all around town, or a car that has no gas in it and sits in the driveway. That’s the difference.

Or if you’re, you know, a kid and you’re on your bike and you can’t cross the street without asking mom or dad, or you can’t go past a certain point, that’s exactly what agents are. Okay. And I know what the captain in you is thinking. I like being in control. I get it. I do too. Delegation does not mean giving up control. It means getting more control of your life. True about humans, true about this.

I asked you in a in episode 472, and I’ll ask it again. If you disappeared this week, would your business keep breathing? Or would it flatline? For most of you, if you’re not there, it’ll fall apart. And that’s not freedom, that’s survival. An agent is the first thing in your business that runs while you’re asleep. Told you about my crew, my all my subagents that go out in episode 471. Here’s what it’s done since then.

Okay, my agent builds my agent audits both of my websites every single day and fixes what it finds. It reads the reporter request emails three times a day and drafts pitches for me to approve. That’s why I’ve been getting so much media lately. It runs a job search for a friend of mine three times a day and emails him the leads. It pulls the Zoom call I record into my brain overnight, my obsidian brain, which is a whole nother episode.

So I never lose what a client told me. And that my AI also always has the context of every conversation, email, or Zoom call that I have. And every one of those comes back to me first. Like I decide. And the messy part. Because I’m not selling you a fantasy. Mine gets stuck sometimes. I had a week this summer where my nighttime jobs they jammed up at night. I had 14 things running at night.

And if one thing stopped for whatever reason, it created a traffic jam and it stopped all these others. But through working through that and not just getting frustrated and walking away, I learned things that I can now pass on to you guys. And why now? The door to this got easier this year. Because I really love being the first in the industry to do anything. That’s my track record. That’s what I’m known for. Okay. And it makes a lot of people uncomfortable. I get it.

But if you’re still listening to this podcast, you’re a jumper. News flash. You’re the one that likes to jump, that doesn’t wait for the perfect time, that knows that sometimes things are gonna be a little messy. Okay. You are courageous. You’re still listening to this podcast. And all I’ve been doing is talking about AI agents. So you, my friend, are probably. Really interested in this.

And I told you in episode 471, and it’s still true, you will never ever feel ready for the thing that’s about to change your business. So literally stop waiting to feel ready. Now, I wouldn’t be Bella if I didn’t give you homework. And so it’s one question, and it’s just something I want you to like percolate on this week. What’s one thing that you do every single week that an onboarded employee could do if you train them right? Okay.

You could even ask your chat or your Claude, hey, what’s something, you know, everything you know about me? What’s what are the things that I constantly am doing? Now, write it down, not five things, just one, and that’s your first agent that your job’s gonna that that the first job that your agent gets to do. Okay. And I want you to bring it to the next episode because I’m gonna use that, that idea that you have, and we’re gonna work it out.

Because I’m not gonna hold anything back. Every job that I would hold that I would hand an agent in a pet business, department by department, front desk, scheduling, marketing, hiring, payroll, your own brain, that’s the what. And the one after that, the episode after that, the three-part series I’m about to do, the how, it’s gonna be the wrong ways so that you don’t make those mistakes. I’ve made the mistakes. Let me, let me warn you: like, hey, don’t step there.

I rolled my ankle and it hurt. Okay, why wouldn’t you want? To just come along this journey with me, please, and share this out in whatever groups or friends or business besties that you have. They do not have to be in the pet industry either. Okay. I know a lot of you have multiple businesses. And so I know that you came in here asking, like, does my pet business need an AI agent? And you’re leaving with one question of your own.

And if you’re not hearing what it could do today, it’s on purpose. Because today I just need you to stop being scared about it. Please. I can’t. Fear is something that we all have. It’s how we carry it around that determines how successful we are. So, does your business need an agent? Here’s my honest answer. Yes, because you’re the captain and you’ve been mopping the deck for years.

And there’s finally a hire that costs less than software, honestly, and asks before it moves and never sends a thing without your hands on it or your approval. The three words at the start of this episode, that scares me. Three words now, I need one. Hopefully that’s been your transition today. When you’re ready to actually build one, that’s what we do inside the jump mastermind. Not theory, your screen, your business, your first job with me in the room. It’s where Leia built hers.

It’s where Vicki learned about it. If if you’re not in there yet, you can jump in by going to jumpconsulting.net for forward slash mastermind. And you can watch all of the tutorials that I have. or we can get on a call and we can talk about it and see if it’s right for you. Jumpconsulting.net forward slash 20. But honestly, if you’re a DIYer, if you’re someone who’s scrappy, if you started your own business, I think you pretty much are. that’s the place for you.

I don’t rope you into years worth of, you know, like a contract or anything. It’s month to month. So if you get in there and you decide you don’t like it, cool. But if there’s any place in the industry that you want to learn about AI and especially agents right now, this is the place to be. I will make you back your membership like that. Promise. If not, I’ll give you your money back. Seriously. Like, that’s how confident I am.

All right, that’s a wrap on episode 475 of Bella In Your Business. Everything that we talked about today, episodes 470, 71, 72, the Bluevine survey, the free 20-minute call, the mastermind, it’s all in the show notes at jumpconsulting.net. Just hit the podcast button. No digging around. It’s all right there. And hey, if this episode hit, will you share it with just one small business owner? I would really appreciate that. We don’t charge for this podcast, and that would be so super helpful.

Or text it to someone or share it in a Facebook group or your local business networking group, wherever. This is exactly the kind of thing that’s a lot more to fun to figure out when you’re not doing it alone.

Does Your Pet Business Need an AI Agent? Every Fear Answered (And Why I Say Hire One) / Ep. 475