What Paul Schmidt Learned Building AI Agents That Drove $1M in Efficiency at SmartBug - Ep 10

Learn more and connect with Paul Schmidt:

• Agent.ai Profile: https://agent.ai/human/paulschmidt
• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/drumming/
• X (Twitter): https://x.com/drumming

Public Agents by Paul:

1. Manufacturing sell sheet creator - https://agent.ai/profile/manufacturing-sell-sheet-creator - Instantly generate professional, one-page sell sheets for your manufacturing products.. Used this on an agent AI workshop with prospects, where we all worked on this agent together and everyone walked away with their own customized version of this agent.
2. Agentic Idea Generator - https://agent.ai/profile/agentic-ai-idea-generator - Helps companies brainstorm agents that align with a consumption based pricing model
3. AI Dataset Recommendation Agent - https://agent.ai/profile/AI-Dataset-Recommendation-Agent - Good AI outputs requires good data input. This agent helps departments think through the types of datasets they need to create for effective AI output.
4. GiftSage: The Corporate Gifting Strategist -  https://agent.ai/profile/corporate-gifting-ideas - Purpose of this agent is to provide the top gift ideas that would resonate most with your customer or prospect or partner.
5. Non-boring Event Swag Idea Agent - https://agent.ai/profile/event-swag-generator - Purpose of this agent is to provide the top swag ideas that would resonate most with an audience of an event.

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“We think about almost a million dollars in efficiency that we've created just by launching this agent for us.”

— Paul Schmidt, VP of Marketing & Innovation, SmartBug Media

How do you prep your sales team with deep insights before a first call, without making them do hours of manual research?

For Paul Schmidt and the team at SmartBug Media, the answer came through a homegrown AI agent that transformed their CRM into a powerful prospect intelligence tool.

By integrating HubSpot with Agent.ai, they built a research agent that auto-generates company background, technographic data, case study matches, discovery questions, and even custom follow-up emails. Sales reps now go into calls sounding like insiders, with no manual digging through spreadsheets or old decks required.

Paul’s estimate? Nearly $1M in efficiency gains by reducing the time spent on prep across their sales pipeline.

And none of this happened all at once.

It began with something much smaller: an agent designed to stop the noisy Slack messages like “Has anyone worked with a manufacturing client before?” That early win helped them organize historical case study data, which became a key input for their more advanced sales research agent.

The core takeaway?

“Start small. Build for the future.”

And get your data in order.

Once the foundation was in place, the SmartBug team started layering on more complexity. They began using multiple LLMs tailored to different steps in the workflow, generating executive briefings, and analyzing call transcripts for marketing, CS, and sales insights. All of this is built on a single structured data layer customized to SmartBug's business.

Paul is also leading a cultural shift at SmartBug, working to raise AI fluency across the team. He believes real adoption starts with leadership.

“Your leaders need to be using AI every single day.”

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