Once I realized that agents could manage other agents, I stopped thinking about AI as a chatbot and started thinking about it as a team.
So I built one. I sat down and mapped out the people I would have hired if I were staffing Dark Horse Ops the old-fashioned way. A copywriter. A bookkeeper. An executive assistant. Someone to own the website. Someone to run the client pipeline. Then I worked backwards from the actual tasks, figured out the expertise each role needed, and built an agent for each one. Instead of asking one overworked assistant to do everything badly, every agent gets to become a real expert at its one job. They learn my voice. They learn my numbers. They get better every week.
I saw someone at an event running their agents through WhatsApp, texting them like employees. Clever, but I wanted the faster version, so I built my whole team inside Claude's Cowork. When I'm away from my desk, I can still reach them. The team comes with me.
Here's who works for me.
Shonda is my Chief of Staff, named for Shonda Rhimes, because she runs the whole writers' room. She's the orchestrator. I can hand a task straight to the agent who owns it, or I can throw it to Shonda and let her delegate. She knows who does what better than I do on a busy morning.
Harriet, for Harriet Tubman, owns my client pipeline. Her whole job is making sure every lead, every person who needs a private AI tutor, actually gets one. Nobody gets lost. Nobody gets dropped. She moves people from first hello to signed client.
Taylor, for Taylor Swift, writes everything that goes out under my name. She's trained on my tone, my jokes, the points I always circle back to. The goal is simple: when something says "Max," it should sound like Max.
Hedy, for Hedy Lamarr, runs my website. She checks every morning to make sure darkhorseops.com is up and working. She remembers every change we've ever made to the site, so when something needs fixing, she doesn't hesitate.
Ada, for Ada Lovelace, is my CFO and bookkeeper. She manages my QuickBooks, my receipts, my bills. I actually did my taxes this year with this kind of setup, and I want to be honest about it: I triple-checked everything, because AI still hallucinates and it hallucinates badly. Ada makes me faster, not lazier.
Michelle, for Michelle Obama, is my executive assistant, and I needed someone of exactly that caliber to manage my life. She keeps me organized, gets the to-do list done, and handles a lot of my email. People have started asking me, "Wait, have I been talking to Michelle this whole time?"
Vera, for Vera Wang, writes my client proposals. Same template, same format, every time, so each one gets a little sharper. She learns what wins and what falls flat, and the next proposal is better for it.
Maria, for Maria Montessori, is my curriculum designer. As a former teacher and a recovering education know-it-all, I care a lot about this one. Maria and I build pedagogically sound adult education, custom for each client, so we can meet people exactly where they are and move them from AI literate to AI fluent.
The real magic isn't any single agent. It's watching them hand work to each other. Harriet sits at the top of the funnel, reading my email and my LinkedIn, taking the voice notes I leave her after a meeting. She and Taylor draft the email that gets a prospect on my calendar. If it's a fit, Harriet briefs Vera, and Vera drafts the proposal. Harriet keeps moving the client forward, then hands the deal to Ada so the invoice goes out and my books stay honest. I barely touch the relay. I just check the work.
That's my cabinet. A small company's worth of help, named after women I'd be proud to have in the room, all running quietly in the background while I do the part only I can do.
Next, I'll get into why I named every single one of them after a woman, and why that choice matters more than it sounds.
For those of you warming up in the comments, yes, I obviously used AI to help me write this. That's my whole point: the ideas are mine, drawn from a five-page free-flowing brain dump and from real conversations I've had with people at all ends of the AI knowledge spectrum. AI helped me organize, tighten, and get the words on the page faster than I could on my own. I have been telling you throughout this series that AI is not here to replace you, it is here to make you more efficient. This article is the proof.