The Automation Agency
Whole-system automation · UK

Three freelancers, three
half-finished systems. Or one that fits together.

Most businesses end up hiring separately for the chatbot, the CRM integration and the reporting dashboard, then discover nobody is accountable once the three stop talking to each other. We build the whole stack ourselves — workflows, AI agents, integrations and the plain code in between — so one team understands how it fits together. We use AI where it genuinely earns its place, reading and deciding on messy information, and ordinary deterministic automation everywhere else, because it is cheaper and more predictable.

Who we build for
We build whole automation systems for UK businesses of roughly five to fifty staff, usually ones that have tried piecing it together from several freelancers.
What we take off people
We automate a whole business process end to end across the systems it touches — CRM, accounting in Xero or Sage, messaging, documents and dashboards — with AI in the parts where it earns its place and a person approving anything that touches money.
What it costs to start
Our fixed prices start at £300 for a chatbot and £500 for a single automation; a whole process built end to end starts at £3,000, and the written Process Audit is £1,500, credited against a custom build.
Where we are
We are based in Chesterfield, Derbyshire, and work with clients across the UK, with in-person kickoffs anywhere in the East Midlands.
The problem

Why this keeps happening.

Most businesses end up hiring separately for the chatbot, the CRM integration and the reporting dashboard — three different freelancers, three half-finished systems that don't talk to each other, and nobody who understands the whole picture once something breaks. On top of that, "AI" gets bolted onto every sales pitch going right now, and a lot of what is sold as an AI agent turns out to be a chatbot wrapper with no real engineering behind it. We build the whole stack ourselves — workflows, agents, integrations and the plain code in between — so there is one team who understands how it all fits together.

What we build

Example workflows

  1. 01

    New enquiry arrives by form, email or WhatsApp → an AI agent reads it, checks your CRM, and either replies or flags it for a human

  2. 02

    Nightly data pipeline → pulls figures from several sources, runs them through your scoring or prediction logic, and refreshes a dashboard before anyone is awake

  3. 03

    Public or partner websites → monitored on a schedule, with an alert the moment something relevant changes

  4. 04

    CRM record updated → triggers whatever needs to happen elsewhere: a Slack message, a WhatsApp confirmation, an invoice, a row in a sheet

  5. 05

    Multi-tenant platform → each customer's workflows, permissions and messaging kept separate but running on one shared system underneath

  6. 06

    Recurring manual report → replaced with a scheduled job that pulls the numbers and sends itself

From £3,000
Proof it works
Marmadbir, Punthub & PlusRooms

Three different sectors — field-service dispatch, predictive racing analytics, property planning data — each running on a system we designed, built and still support end to end. Some of it is classic automation, some of it (Punthub's prediction models) is genuinely AI; we use whichever one actually solves the problem, not whichever sounds better in a pitch.

3

production systems shipped, three different industries

How we count — what this number measures, and what we have not finished checking.

Common questions

Answers before you ask.

What does "AI agent" actually mean?+

It means software that can look at unstructured information — an email, a message, a scraped web page — decide what it means, and take an action, rather than just following a fixed if-this-then-that rule. In practice that's usually a language model doing the reading and deciding, wired into ordinary code and APIs that do the actual work: updating a CRM, sending a message, writing to a database. It's less mysterious than the marketing suggests, and more useful once you see it running on your own data.

Is it safe to let AI make decisions in our business?+

We build with a human in the loop by default — the agent handles the routine cases and hands over anything it isn't confident about, with the full context attached, rather than guessing. For anything touching money, contracts or a customer commitment, we add explicit checks and an approval step rather than letting the AI act unsupervised. You decide where that line sits; we build to it.

How much does AI automation cost?+

Whole-system work is a custom build, from £3,000, fixed and agreed before we start rather than billed hourly. Builds spanning several systems (CRM, WhatsApp, dashboards, data pipelines) are quoted as one number after a scoping call, and multi-agent stacks are from £8,000. The £1,500 Process Audit sizes it first. Credited in full against any custom build (£3,000+) if you proceed within 60 days. If what you need is one workflow rather than a system, that is from £500 and does not need an audit at all.

What's the difference between this and hiring separate agencies for the chatbot, the CRM and the reporting?+

Mainly that one team builds and understands the whole thing. When your chatbot, your CRM integration and your reporting dashboard are each built by a different freelancer, nobody is accountable when they stop talking to each other. We design them as one system from the start, which is also why it usually costs less than three separate projects.

Do you only use AI, or plain automation too?+

Both, and usually mostly the latter. AI is genuinely good at reading and understanding messy, unstructured information; deterministic automation is faster, cheaper and more predictable for everything else. We use AI where it earns its place and skip it everywhere it would just add cost and unpredictability for no real benefit.

Related services
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01246 923041

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You don't need a technical plan. Describe what your team does now and what you'd like to happen instead, in your own words. We reply within 24 hours.

A useful first message answers four things:

  1. What does someone on your team do by hand at the moment?
  2. Which software does it involve? Email, spreadsheets, your accounts package — whatever you use.
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  4. What should a person still check before it goes out?

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