Stop trying to build your own AI agent

Short answer: you don't need to learn how AI agents work to use one, any more than you need to understand broadband infrastructure to get online. Husayn Kassai, founder of ollo and previously Onfido, calls spending "a few weeks getting trained on how to build AI agents" the worst AI advice he's heard given to a small business owner, and the reasoning holds up.

The advice that sounds responsible but wastes your time

Some AI advice sounds sensible on the surface: understand the tool before you use it, invest in training, build internal capability. Kassai pushes back on this directly when it comes to AI agents specifically.

"The worst piece of advice is the need to go and spend a few weeks getting trained on how to build AI agents," he says. "It's sort of like if I want to connect to the internet, I don't need to study how internet technology works. I just subscribe to Virgin Media or someone else."

Nobody tells a small business owner to learn networking protocols before getting broadband. The same logic applies here, and it's being ignored.

Where the line actually sits

Kassai isn't saying don't bother learning about AI at all. His distinction is specific: "Everyone should be proficient and able to use a straightforward Claude or GPT for research purposes, for brainstorming, for light touch things."

That's the "learn to drive" tier: worth doing, low stakes, genuinely useful. The line he draws is at the next tier up: "But to have a reliable agent that you can put in front of a customer to take calls for you or to book appointments or to do invoice management, those are not ones you ought to build. You ought to pay a subscription and have others do it."

Customer-facing, operationally critical automation is a different category from personal AI use. One is worth learning yourself. The other is worth buying.

Why this distinction matters

If you're a small business owner and someone's told you to "get your team trained on AI agents," it's worth asking what they actually mean. Learning to use Claude or ChatGPT well for your own thinking and drafting is genuinely worth a few hours of your time. Learning to build a production agent that takes real customer calls or manages real bookings is a specialist skill that already exists as a bought product, not something worth weeks of your time to DIY.

The cost of getting this backwards isn't small. Weeks spent learning to build something you could have subscribed to is weeks not spent running your actual business.

What this means for you

If the advice you're getting is "go learn to build it," ask instead: does a tool already exist for this? For most common SME problems (phone handling, bookings, compliance logging), the honest answer from Kassai's own experience is yes, and it's a subscription away, not a training course away. He names the specific tools UK small businesses are already using for trades, hospitality and appointment-led services.

What to try this month

Before enrolling in anything that promises to teach you AI agent building, spend twenty minutes searching for an existing tool built for your specific problem instead. If one exists (and for most common SME operational tasks, one does), that's the faster, cheaper path.

Want to hear how other founders are doing it? Come to one of our free events, where founders and people who teach AI share what's working for them, or try our free AI tools to work out where AI fits in your business.