The problem
Ben needed to scale fast, and he'd already bet on AI as part of how he'd do it. I'd previously helped him clean up his Notion workspace — clear divisions, clear SOPs, clear documentation. What he still lacked wasn't information, it was a system to actually scale on top of, across every function of the business at once.
What I did
A secure n8n portal handles tool access, n8n itself does orchestration, and Claude sits underneath doing the reasoning — but ‘an agent that calls tools’ isn't an operating system on its own. It needed short-term memory for the task at hand, long-term memory so it doesn't relearn the business every run, a registry of tools it's actually allowed to touch, a guardrail that stops it before anything risky, and logs that feed back into what it knows next time:
On top of that stack, we designed a discovery → documentation → scale framework. Discovery: the agent calls internal tools directly via API, guided by a file telling it exactly where to read documentation from. Documentation & planning: Claude reads the process, understands it, and builds a plan. Scale: I layer in automation that requires standardization, with Claude monitoring and doing the parts of the work that need active input.
What happened
Ben now directs the business and Claude executes across it — discovery, documentation, and monitored automation all running on the same framework instead of five separate ad-hoc efforts.