For owners and small teams

AI agents for small businesses: start with one job and one approval point

An agent earns its place by taking one repetitive job off your plate while you keep the decisions. This guide shows how to choose that first job, connect the tools you already pay for, set the checks, and read what a plan costs before you commit.

Try one agent job on the Free plan Compare five first jobs

Agent brief · template

Job: Follow up new enquiries
Reads: The shared inbox
Writes: One contact record per enquiry
Needs approval: Every outbound message
Stops when: A required field is missing

An illustrative brief to adapt for your own agent. It is a template, not a recorded run.

Choose the first job by what a mistake would cost

Five jobs small businesses commonly hand over first. For each: the sign it is ready, the step a person should keep, and the connectors on ZeroTwo's list that touch it.

First jobs for an AI agent in a small business: when to start, what a person keeps, and related connectors.
Job	Start here when	Keep a person on	Related connectors	Read more
Lead follow-up	Enquiries land in one inbox and wait hours for a reply.	Anything that quotes a price, a discount or a deadline.	HubSpot, Salesforce, Gmail, Outlook Email	see a lead research and enrichment workflow
Support triage	The same handful of questions fills the support inbox.	Refunds, complaints and anything with legal weight.	Gmail, Outlook Email, Notion	browse agent use cases
Scheduling	Bookings are lost in back-and-forth email.	High-value meetings and anything that would double-book you.	Google Calendar, Outlook Calendar	Outlook scheduling assistant
Invoice and expense prep	Receipts and invoices pile up before month-end.	Every posting to the books. The agent prepares, you approve.	Xero, Stripe, PayPal	browse agent use cases
Email outreach	You have a list and a message but no time to personalise.	The final send and every unsubscribe request.	Gmail, Outlook Email, HubSpot	compare models for writing

Editorial guidance from ZeroTwo, which publishes this page. It is a starting rule, not a measured ranking.

A lead-to-CRM agent, written down field by field

This is a configuration design to copy and adjust, not a result we measured. Every line is something you decide and then check in your own account. For a worked sales example, see a lead research and enrichment workflow.

The recipe

Job: Turn a new enquiry into a researched, scored CRM record and a drafted reply that a person approves.
Connectors: HubSpot or Salesforce for the record, Gmail or Outlook Email for the inbox. All four are on the connectors list.
Trigger: Start by asking in chat. Once that works, put it on a schedule. ZeroTwo's scheduled tasks page describes recurring runs; confirm in your account what triggers your plan offers before you rely on one.
Fields: Source, company, role, the need in their own words, a fit score with the reason, a next step and an owner.
Permissions: Grant the narrowest access each connector offers. Read the inbox, create and update contacts, never delete, never send.
Approval point: A person approves every outbound message and every change to an existing record.
Failure handling: Write the instruction so a missing field is left blank and flagged, a connector error stops the run and names the record, and nothing is retried automatically.
Run log: Keep a dated list of what was read, written and skipped. Scheduled tasks describes run history, outputs and approvals; check what your account shows.

Check before it goes live

Run it on five old enquiries first, with writes switched off.
Open each draft next to the original message and mark every claim the draft added.
Check the record fields against what you would have typed yourself.
Confirm the approval step blocks sending, not just warns.
Only then point it at live enquiries, and keep reading the log for the first two weeks.

What “train it on your business” means

You supply your FAQs, price list and process notes as files and written instructions, and the agent reads them each time it runs. Plans differ in how many projects and memories you can keep, so the Free plan suits a trial of one small job.

What it does not mean

Nothing in this recipe asks you to train or fine-tune a model. How your data is handled is set out in the privacy policy, not on this page.

Connect the tools you already pay for

A small selection from ZeroTwo's connector list, grouped by the jobs above. The connectors page has the full list. Availability depends on your plan, so check your own stack there first.

HubSpot
Salesforce
Gmail
Outlook Email
Google Calendar
Outlook Calendar
Google Contacts
Xero
Stripe
PayPal
Asana
Notion
Airtable
Zapier
Make
Microsoft Teams

Choose the model with your own ten examples

ZeroTwo offers 60+ models from several providers. We do not publish a winner per job, because the right pick depends on your documents and your tolerance for error. Test it instead.

Collect ten real examples
Ten enquiries, tickets or invoices from last month, including the awkward ones.
Run two models on the same ten
Change only the model. Keep the instruction, the files and the connectors identical.
Mark errors, not style
Count wrong facts, missed fields and invented details. Pick on that count, then on cost.

OpenAI
Anthropic
Google
xAI
Mistral
DeepSeek
Cohere
Perplexity
Qwen
Groq
Kimi

Browse every model on the models page, or compare options for writing, research and business.

What running an agent costs

Cost is credits, not a count of agents. Every model, image, video and deep-research run draws from one monthly credit pool, and heavier tasks use more. Selected lines from each plan are shown here; the pricing page has the full list and is the source of record. Compare against other tools on the AI pricing comparison.

Free
$0/mo
- 100 free credits to start
- +20 bonus credits every day you log in
- 1 file upload per message
- Limited model selection
No card required.
Start on Free
Plus
$14.99/mo
$11.99/mo billed annually
- 1,000 free Auto requests / month
- 1,650 monthly credits
- +20 bonus credits every day you log in
- Access to Work agent
- 150 deep researches / month (uses credits)
- Exa web search
Choose Plus
Pro
$29.99/mo
$26.99/mo billed annually
- 2,500 free Auto requests / month
- 3,500 monthly credits
- +30 bonus credits every day you log in
- Unlimited projects
- Access to deep research
- Access to Work agent
- 1,500 Firecrawl credits
Choose Pro

Working as a team? Business is $39.99 per seat per month with 4,000 monthly credits per seat (pooled). The Free plan has no Work agent, so a first agent job is best tried in chat there and moved to a paid plan once it earns its keep.

Questions owners ask before they start

Which job should a small business hand to an agent first?

Pick the job where a wrong answer is cheap and easy to spot, you already do it the same way every time, and you can describe the right output in a few lines. Lead follow-up and support triage fit that description for many small businesses, as long as a person approves anything that leaves the building. Invoicing and bookkeeping fit too, with the rule that the agent prepares and you approve every posting.

Do agents work with the tools I already use?

ZeroTwo lists connectors for tools such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Gmail, Outlook, Google Calendar, Xero, Stripe, Asana and Notion. The connectors page is the source for the current list, and which connectors you can use depends on your plan, so check it against your own stack before you plan around a specific tool.

What does training an agent on my data mean here?

Nothing on this page requires training a model. You give the agent your FAQs, price list and process notes as files and instructions, and it uses them as context when it runs. Plans differ in how many projects and memories you can keep, so the Free plan suits a trial of one small job. For how ZeroTwo handles your data, read the privacy policy.

How much do AI agents cost for a small business?

ZeroTwo has a Free plan with no card required, Plus at $14.99/month and Pro at $29.99/month ($26.99/month billed annually). Every model, image, video and deep-research run draws from a monthly credit pool, so heavier work costs more credits. Business is $39.99 per seat per month with pooled credits.

Is there a limit on how many agents I can run?

Plans are metered in credits and free Auto requests rather than by counting agents, and this page does not promise unlimited deployments. Your real limit is the credit allowance on your plan, which the pricing page lists. Start with one job, watch how many credits it uses over a few weeks, and add the next one from there.

Is it safe to give an agent customer data?

Only as safe as the access you grant and the checks you keep. Give each connector the narrowest permission it offers, keep a person on anything that sends or deletes, and review the run log. This page makes no security or compliance promise; the privacy policy and terms are the documents that govern your data.