Business owners can treat Claude AI automation as a first hire rather than a chatbot, Matt Ebso said on The Calum Johnson Show, where he showed how people with no coding background can hand repetitive work to an AI agent and save money in the process.
Ebso, who produces software tutorials for Metics Media in his day job, argued that owners lose too many hours to repetitive admin. His alternative to hiring for that work is to give an AI agent access to the right accounts, explain the job properly once, and let it run.
Host Calum Johnson asked how that works in practice, and Ebso walked through what his own agent had done for him this year.
“My agent found a way for me to save $20,000 this year. Actually, several ways that kind of combined to make it so that I saved $20,000. It’s got access to my email.”
Matt Ebso
How an AI agent found $20,000 in savings
Ebso said he gave Claude access to his email and records, and it went looking for money he was leaving on the table. One morning, he said, it flagged a tax form he had not filed and told him filing it could save him $18,000 this year. He checked with his accountant, who agreed, and he filed it.
The next day, Ebso said, the agent pointed out that he was paying about double what new customers paid for electricity, and that a few clicks in his supplier’s portal would cut the bill in half. Those are his figures for his own household and business, not a general promise, but the method travels: an agent that can read your invoices and statements can check them against what you should be paying.
For owners who want to try this on their books, our report on how Claude connects to Xero, Shopify and other business tools covers the integrations.
Delegate, automate, eliminate
Ebso said his thinking started with Tim Ferriss’s book The 4-Hour Workweek and its framework of delegating, automating and eliminating tasks. His twist is to put automation ahead of handing work to a person.
“You don’t stop there. You should never delegate something that could be automated because that’s a better use of your time and money,” he said. Handing a manual task to an employee keeps a recurring cost on the payroll; a working automation keeps doing the job. He also urged people to ask what could be dropped altogether, saying many tasks should simply go.
Once a process is written down and tested, it can be connected to workflow tools such as Zapier so that it runs in the background.
Why AI agents forget, and how to brief them
A common complaint is that AI tools forget instructions. Ebso described every new conversation as a genius with amnesia waking up: it has to read all the context again before it knows what to do, so you cannot assume it remembers anything.
His answer is a three-part brief for every task.
“It’s really important to think about when you are prompting to think of it in three parts. The context, the task, and the format.”
Matt Ebso
Context is the background: the business, the history and the constraints. The task is the exact job. The format is what the output must look like, whether a spreadsheet, an email or a file.
He also gives the agent permission up front for low-risk decisions. By default, he said, agents ask before doing anything, which is sensible, but if you want one to run on its own you have to say what it may decide without checking in. That matters more as the cost of agents that run for long stretches comes down.
When a job works, Ebso has Claude turn its first, exploratory run into a repeatable recipe saved as a skill. He uses the most capable models for that discovery pass, then moves the routine job to cheaper models once the skill is set up.
Building an app without writing code
Ebso’s most concrete example was a meal planning app he built with Claude Code. His wife has specific dietary needs, and he said the household was spending 12 to 16 hours a week on everything involved in getting food on the table: finding recipes, planning meals and shopping.
The app plans the week’s meals around those needs and, when they are happy with the plan, loads the shopping into their online cart at Mercadona, the Spanish grocery chain. He turned it into a progressive web app that lives on his phone, and said it runs for free on Cloudflare. His point on cost was blunt: Claude Code is available for $20 a month, so the real question is what not using it costs you.
Others are taking the same route to sell software, as in our piece on using Claude Code to build products.
Chat, Cowork and Code as three different hires
Ebso maps Anthropic‘s three ways of using Claude onto roles in a company:
- Chat is the consultant you ask when you have a question.
- Cowork is the assistant that carries out tasks and shows its own to-do list as it works.
- Code is the developer that builds lasting tools.
“The chat tab is like a consultant. It’s like somebody, if you’re thinking about it in terms of employees you might hire. Your chat tab is the consultant you go to ask when you have a question,” he said.
What this means for South African businesses
The useful lesson for a South African owner is the order of operations rather than the dollar figures. Start with the task that costs you the most hours each week, brief the agent with context, task and format, decide in advance what it may do without asking, and only then think about hiring for what is left.
Ebso’s own starting point is simple. He suggested owners “identify the biggest pain points that you’re currently experiencing in your life and then hit the microphone button on a conversation with Claude and just talk through them with it.” Talking through the week’s frustrations gives the tool enough to suggest what to automate first. Supplier invoices, municipal and utility accounts and client intake are obvious places to look.
