what i told 400+ people on stage about AI

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hey friends,

i spoke to 400+ people on stage in china about using AI agents for SEO.

after the talk, multiple people told me i changed how they thought about AI.

the same idea that changed my mindset stuck with them:

give AI access to your tools, with the right guardrails, & it can do far more than you’d expect.

it sounds simple. but 99% of people use AI wrong

you open a chat. explain what you’re doing. copy something from another app. paste it in. get an answer. take that answer somewhere else.

you’re still moving everything around.

you’re the bottleneck...

once you give AI direct access to your systems, so many doors open

the SEO example

asking AI to write a blog post is one use case.

but imagine connecting an agent to your Search Console data, analytics & website content.

you could ask:

“which pages are losing search traffic? look at the queries, inspect the pages & suggest what we should change first.”

with those connections working, the agent could do all the manual work that would take you hours.

you don’t have to waste time & AI can generate work based off real data. not AI slop.

& this goes way beyond SEO.

look at the tools you already use

a lot of your work involves reading something from different software & making decisions

you open your email, then to reply to someone you have to check your CRM or another piece of software to get data.

but again…why are you the bottleneck?

if you just connect AI to every tool you use (email, CRM, calendar, etc) anything you can do, AI can do.

not every task will work immediately. the quality of the data, the integration & the instructions all matter.

but look at what you actually do inside the software, rather than only asking what the AI can write.

that’s where you start finding useful work to hand over.

how do you connect it?

sometimes the app already has a connector. you authorize access through OAuth, ideally choosing only the permissions the agent needs.

sometimes there’s a documented API your agent can work with.

other times the integration takes more work. the fastest way is just asking your agent:

“i want to give you access to {this software} is there an API you can connect to? or Oauth connection to it somehow? if not, can you try reverse engineering a rough API so you can work inside it?”

more access needs better boundaries

when i say give it more tools, i don’t mean give it unrestricted control of your business.

start with read-only access where possible.

let it investigate, summarize & prepare things before you let it change them.

require approval before it sends emails, publishes content, changes important records or spends money.

& check the actual result. “done” in a chat isn’t the same as a verified change in your software.

you want useful access with clear limits. not an agent that can do anything to anything.

try this with your own work

write down the tools you open during a normal workday.

next to each one, write what you keep doing inside it.

then pick one recurring task & ask:

you don’t need to connect everything this week.

start with one task you understand well enough to judge the result.

that’s what i want you to take away from the china talk.

the next useful thing your AI does might come from connecting it to a tool you already use every day.

if you want to build this yourself alongside me, join AI Operators.

if you want my team to help connect AI to your business tools & workflows, talk to us at Cyndra.

i appreciate you reading this. reply & tell me which tool you’d want your agent connected to first.

i’m rooting for you & hope the best.

→ johann