The working agent
Reads the inbox, the CRM, the folder or the phone line. Does the task the way you would do it. Writes the reply, raises the invoice, books the slot, assembles the pack. Works to your rules, in your voice, inside your systems.
British AI agents, with the oversight built in
Every agent we build comes with a second agent watching it.
Hardy & Butler builds AI agents that take real work off your team, then proves exactly what they did. Butler does the work. Hardy holds the line, so nothing irreversible happens without a person saying yes.
Answered by a real person, guaranteed to get back to you the same working day.
The two halves
Meet Hardy and Butler.
Butler does the leg work. Hardy makes sure it is safe to do so. Butler does the task. Hardy checks what it is allowed to do, records what happened and asks for approval where it is needed. We named the company after the two jobs because we include both in the same engagement.
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Hardy
Checks every action against the agreed rules, keeps the record, and gives your team a way to stop the agent.
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Butler
Does the work. Reads, sorts, analyses, drafts and prepares, then waits to be checked.
The systems you already run.
Your agents work inside them, with the same permissions your team already has.
- Microsoft 365
- Outlook
- Teams
- SharePoint
- Google Workspace
- Salesforce
- HubSpot
- Xero
- Sage
- QuickBooks
- Slack
- Zapier
- Stripe
- FreeAgent
- Dropbox
- Twilio
- Notion
- DocuSign
02 / The problem
You have been pitched AI. You have not been shown the bill, or the brakes.
Most businesses your size have now sat through the demo. Something impressive happened on a screen, and then the conversation moved to a pilot, a workshop, a platform licence and a date some months out. Very little of it survives contact with the way your business actually runs on a Tuesday.
The two questions nobody answers well are the two that matter to you. What does it cost to run, every month, once the excitement has gone. And what happens the first time it gets something wrong, in writing, to a customer.
We built Hardy & Butler to answer both questions: what it costs, and what happens when it gets something wrong. Most of these projects do not fail because the technology cannot do it. They fail because nobody could say what it cost, what it did, or who was accountable when it went wrong.
How it runs today
01Open the inbox
02Read it, work out what it is
03Find the last thread
04Check the CRM for the account
05Check whether anyone has replied
06Find the price, or the policy
07Ask the person who knows
08Wait
09Chase, again
10Draft the reply
11Log it in the CRM
12Get it checked
13Send it
14Handle the one that is not standard
01 to 14Fourteen steps, today. Tap to see them.
01Open the inbox
02Read it, work out what it is
03Find the last thread
04Check the CRM for the account
05Check whether anyone has replied
06Find the price, or the policy
07Ask the person who knows
08Wait
09Chase, again
10Draft the reply
11Log it in the CRM
12Get it checked
13Send it
14Handle the one that is not standard
How it runs with an agent
The agent, steps 01 to 11
Reads, sorts, retrieves, drafts, logs.
Same rules, same voice, same systems. Every action written down.
Runs in seconds, not across a day.
Writes down every step it takes.
Chases only who the rules name.
Stops and asks when it is not sure.
A person reviews
A person approves
A person takes the exceptions
The same job. Fourteen steps today. Eleven taken by one agent, three kept by a person.
03 / How it works
The two names
Butler does the work. Hardy makes sure it is safe to let him.
Every build we ship is a pair. One agent does the job. One layer sits over the top of it, and it is not optional, not an upgrade, and not on a separate invoice.
The oversight layer
Holds the list of things Butler may never do on his own authority. Reviews anything outside the list before it happens. Writes down every action, who approved it and when. And has one switch that pauses an agent, or all of them, immediately.
You get both, or you get neither. Hardy & Butler does not ship an agent it cannot account for.
On Monday morning the inbox is already sorted, the replies are drafted, and the only thing waiting for you is the handful of decisions that were always yours.
04 / Your first agent, and the price
Start here
Most first agents are one of six jobs.
These are the jobs directors ask for most often, and the easiest to measure, which is why the first build is usually one of them rather than a strategy.
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Operations
Inbox Triage
Reads the shared inbox, sorts it, drafts the replies.
Measured on: time from arrival to first reply.
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Sales
Lead Router
Qualifies every enquiry and routes it within minutes.
Measured on: enquiries answered inside ten minutes.
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Finance
Invoice Chaser
Chases late invoices politely, on schedule, until paid.
Measured on: debtor days.
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Customer
Front Desk
Answers the common questions and hands off cleanly.
Measured on: questions resolved without a person.
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Sales
Proposal Builder
Drafts tailored quotes from your own price book.
Measured on: hours per quote, and quote turnaround.
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Finance
Month-End Assembler
Assembles the month-end pack and lists what is missing.
Measured on: working days to close.
See all twenty-four agent models → Each of the six has a page of its own, with the workflow, the boundaries and a labelled test run.
- Lead Router sales
- Proposal Builder sales
- Deal Chaser sales
- Pipeline Reporter sales
- Content Drafter marketing
- Campaign Reporter marketing
- Competitor Watch marketing
- Review Responder marketing
- Invoice Chaser finance
- Purchase Matcher finance
- Month-End Assembler finance
- Spend Watch finance
- Inbox Triage operations
- Document Reader operations
- Job Scheduler operations
- Supplier Chaser operations
- Front Desk customer
- Call Handler customer
- Onboarder customer
- Complaint Router customer
- Applicant Screener people
- Starter Pack people
- Policy Answerer people
- Absence Reporter people
Our prices are on the website.
In a market where most firms will not quote until you have sat through two calls, that is apparently a differentiator. Every engagement starts with a fixed-price audit, and the audit's whole job is to produce a fixed price for the build.
£1,500
AI Opportunity Audit. Two weeks, fixed. Credited in full against any build started within sixty days.
£6,500
First Agent. One agent, one workflow, live in three to four weeks. You own it.
From £450 a month
To run and watch it, including the oversight layer.
Prices in pounds sterling. Not VAT registered, so no VAT is added.
05 / Oversight
The part that rarely makes a home page
Four things Hardy does, on every build, without being asked.
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01 Gatekeeper
Hardy holds the list of things an agent may never do on its own authority. Spend money. Send anything to anyone outside the business. Change who has access. Delete. Those requests do not fail quietly, they wait for a named person.
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02 Reviewer
Anything that falls outside the agreed list gets looked at before it happens, not after. Low risk and clearly within the rules, it proceeds. Anything else stops and asks.
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03 Ledger
Every action is written down: what the agent did, what it used, what it decided, who approved it and at what time. Not a system event log. A record a person, or an auditor, can actually read.
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04 Brake
One switch pauses an agent. One switch pauses all of them. It is in your hands, not ours, and Hardy tests it with you on the day you go live.
Hardy, approval queue
Tuesday, 09:00 to 09:15
Scroll the queue sideways to see what happened.
| Time | What the agent asked to do | What happened |
|---|---|---|
| 09:02 | Draft a reply to a delivery queryNothing left the business at this step | Went ahead on its own |
| 09:07 | Send that reply to the customerLeaves the business, so it asks | Waiting on the Operations Director |
| 09:11 | Raise a credit note for £2,340Spends money, so it asks | Waiting on the Finance Director |
| 09:14 | Change a supplier’s bank detailsOn the list of things it may never do | Blocked, always |
An example of the format, not a customer’s data. Every line is written to the ledger whichever way it goes, including the one that went ahead on its own.
We will not build you an agent we cannot audit.
06 / Who it is for
Around the table
The same agent looks different depending on whose problem it solves.
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Chief Executive
You want fewer things sitting on somebody's desk waiting. Start with the queue that never clears, not with a strategy.
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Finance Director
Chasing, matching and month-end are the three finance directors ask for most, and the three easiest to put a number against.
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Operations Director
The same process, to the same standard, at six on a Sunday morning, with a written record of every step.
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Sales Director
Every enquiry answered in minutes, every stalled deal followed up, every reply logged without anyone being asked to log it.
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Marketing Director
Drafts in your house voice, ready for a person to approve. Reporting that assembles itself on the Monday.
07 / Standards
How we work, on every engagement
No logo wall. These are the terms instead.
- Human approval by default on anything that leaves the business.
- On every agent we build and run for you: your data is never used to train a model, ours or anybody else's.
- UK data residency for the agent's own records, and a data processing agreement on every engagement. How this website handles an enquiry is set out in the privacy notice.
- Working to UK GDPR.
- A written oversight policy and an audit trail for every agent Hardy & Butler deploys.
- You own the agent, the prompts, the configuration and the code. No lock-in.
Cyber Essentials and ISO 27001 are on our roadmap. We have not started either yet. The certificate numbers will be published here when they are issued, and not before.
08 / Next step
Tell us about those tasks that never land on time.
You do not need to know what an agent is, how it works, or which one you need. Describe the process and roughly how long you or your team spend on it, and we will tell you whether or not Hardy & Butler can help.
Answered by a real person, guaranteed to get back to you the same working day.