SolutionsCapability

An AI employee owns a job, not a chat window.

The useful version of an AI agent isn't a chatbot — it's a worker wired into your real systems that owns one job end to end: answer the phone, chase the quote, watch the pipeline, file the paperwork. We build agents that share one brain — your calendar, your prices, your customers — and hand off to a human the moment judgment is needed.

What we build
01

Single-job agents

One workflow, owned end to end and measured: what it handled, what it cost, what it returned.

02

Agent teams

A receptionist, a follow-up chaser, and an ops watcher that share one source of truth instead of three copies of it.

03

Human handoff by design

Drafts for approval, escalation rules, guardrails — the agent proposes, and a person decides wherever the stakes are real.

04

Wired to your data

Your CRM, your inbox, your calendar — not a second platform for your team to learn.

We run on them

Our own business runs on agents we built: an outbound dialer that assembles a live product demo mid-call, a CRM that drafts follow-ups for human review, and a research pass that preps every discovery call. We ship nothing to a client we wouldn't run ourselves.

Either way, you can read a finished Leak Report in full before you talk to us — a full worked example →

Common questions

What owners ask before they commit.

What is the difference between an AI agent and a chatbot?
A chatbot answers questions; an agent completes work. An agent is connected to your real systems and can take actions — book the appointment, update the record, send the follow-up — where a chatbot can only talk about them.
How much does it cost to build a custom AI agent?
Deeper consulting and solution builds start at $1,000. Cost scales with how many systems the agent must touch and how much judgment it needs to exercise. You get a fixed quote after the free Leak Report, not an hourly meter.
Can an AI agent replace an employee?
In our experience it replaces a job, not a person. The realistic win is taking one repetitive workflow off a team that is already stretched, which is why we scope agents around a single job with a measurable before and after.
What stops the agent from doing something wrong?
Explicit guardrails, plus a human in the loop wherever the stakes are real. We define what the agent may decide alone, what it must draft for approval, and what it must escalate — and everything it does is logged.
Who maintains it after it is built?
We do, on an ongoing monthly scope. A system nobody watches quietly stops working, so each month includes tuning, one shipped improvement, and a report on what it returned.
Often built alongside

Related reading — Everyone is quoting the 95% stat wrong.

Would this pay in your business? Let's find out first.

We don't open with a build — we open with the Leak Report: a free first call, then a written diagnosis of your pipeline with a dollar figure on each gap. If this build isn't where your numbers say the money is, we'll tell you what is.

Agency or consultancy with a client who needs this? We build it under your brand →

Anthracite AI is an AI consulting and engineering firm that builds AI systems for small and mid-sized businesses. Based in Charlotte, NC, working with businesses anywhere in the US.