The term "AI agent" gets used for two completely different things, and mixing them up costs real time during deployment. One perceives its environment and acts independently. The other works inside a predictable process you already have. Knowing which one you need changes everything.

I built the AI piece in a couple of hours — the easy part. Deployment was where I got stuck, buried in Google's ecosystem linking Apps Script to a GCP project. I set it aside for the night, frustrated. The next morning, I asked AI for one more thing, and it cracked the case.

It ain't sexy, but it's practical. A data-parsing job — one that's been handled manually for years because the exception rules are genuinely complicated — got handed to AI to automate instead. The setup took real, unglamorous effort, but the hours it's saving every single week now are exactly the kind of space that lets people focus on higher-value thinking.