Creating self-running businesses

- Imagine a business that operates while you sleep, making decisions and generating revenue without constant oversight. This is not science fiction, it's the imaging reality of the agent economy. One of the most exciting opportunities in the agentic AI landscape is what we call agent as a service. Unlike traditional software that needs to be manually operated, agent as a service focuses solely on delivering outcomes. Customers are not buying software. They are essentially hiring a digital employee that works 24/7 to deliver outcomes. For example, instead of buying a tool to manage customer support, a company hires an AI agent that automatically handles tickets, resolves issues, follows up, and improves over time, and all this without human intervention. Other promising areas for self-running businesses include vertical AI agents and AI-driven ecosystem platforms. Vertical AI agents are hyper specialized systems designed for specific industry workflows. For example, medical billing agents can autonomously process claims for clinics, while customer support agents can resolve queries with contextual understanding across industries. Ecosystem platforms act as digital hubs, where AI agents handle tasks like matchmaking between buyers and sellers, negotiating contracts, and monitoring compliance. In logistics, these platforms connect shippers with carriers, negotiate rates, optimize routes in real time. When identifying opportunities for your self-running business, apply the Agentic Opportunity Identification Framework. First, analyze the value chain by breaking down complex workflows into smaller tasks. Identify handoff points where work transitions between different parties. These are often the greatest opportunities for improvement. Next, examine market pain points, areas of friction, expensive cost centers, and quality gaps where current solutions fall short. Then, align these with AI capabilities like language understanding, pattern recognition, and reasoning chains. Finally, consider integration opportunities. How your AI solution can enhance existing tools, leverage available data, and connect to API ecosystems. The most successful AI businesses don't replace existing systems, they enhance them. However, even the most automated business requires human oversight. Establish monitoring dashboards that alert you to unusual patterns or decisions that fall outside your parameters. Schedule regular audits to ensure your AI agents continue to align with your business values and objectives. Remember, designing a self-running business is not about technology alone. It's about reimagining how value is created and delivered. The goal is not replacing human entrepreneurs, but creating new possibilities through human AI collaboration. The future belongs to those who can envision businesses built for AI from the ground up, not just those who use AI as a tool. Start today by identifying one business process that could be transformed into a self-running system with agentic AI.