If you’re setting up AI agents from scratch, the AI agent starter kit is shorter than you’d think. A Claude subscription, the desktop app, the browser extension, the phone app, and whatever’s already sitting in the connectors list. You can have the lot running this afternoon.
Here’s how Jez landed on that list.
A while back Jez spent three and a half hours in Troy’s office. Troy runs Pro Cool, the air con and electrical business in Maitland that looks after mining and transport gear, and he’s also behind Hunter River Retreat, the spa cottages out at Rosebrook. Two completely different businesses, one bloke, and he wanted to know what he could do with AI beyond the basics.
Three and a half hours later he’d answered a question Jez gets asked constantly. Not the theory. The shopping list.
Start with the right Claude subscription
Get a Claude subscription and start on Pro. That’s US$20 a month, so call it thirty odd Australian dollars once the conversion and GST land. Pro is plenty while you’re finding your feet.
The moment you’re running things daily or on a schedule, step up to Max. Agent work chews through usage far faster than normal chat, because the thing is reading files, calling tools and thinking for minutes at a time instead of firing back a paragraph. Max comes in two sizes, US$100 a month for five times the Pro limits and US$200 for twenty times. Most people running a small business on it sit on the first one.
Don’t start there though. Start on Pro, hit the wall, then upgrade. You’ll know within a fortnight.
Install the desktop app and cover your other screens
Install the Claude desktop app on your Mac or Windows machine. This is where it gets good, because the desktop app now holds three things in one. Normal chat. Cowork, where you hand it a whole task and it works across your files, email and the web until it’s done. And Claude Code, the coding one, which Jez comes back to later in the series.
No terminal. Nothing to program. You talk to it like a person.
Then add the browser extension and the phone app, and put it on your iPad if you’ve got one. Connect your email while you’re in there, that’s built in. The point of covering every screen is that you’ll start a job in one place and check it from another. Kick something off at your desk, read the result on your phone while you’re out on a job.
Let it keep working after you close the laptop
Here’s the part that changed recently, and it’s a big one. Cowork now runs your jobs in the cloud, not just on your machine. You can start something, shut the laptop, and it keeps going.
Scheduled jobs run with nothing switched on at all. Set the Monday morning briefing for 6am and it’s sitting there when you walk in. That’s the difference between a clever chat window and something that does real work while you’re asleep.
Connect the tools you already use
Now have a look at the connectors. There are hundreds ready to go.
If you’re on Microsoft or Google, you hook those up in about two clicks, so your email, calendar, docs and files are all connected before anyone’s built a thing. That covers most small businesses on day one. Xero has one too, though it’s fairly limited at the moment, so don’t lean on it too hard yet. Check what it can actually read before you plan a workflow around it.
Worth being honest about what you’ll find. The big platforms are well covered. The trade specific software, the job management system your industry runs on, the booking platform, that’s where the list thins out. Which is the whole reason the next post exists.
If you’re already in the ChatGPT camp
OpenAI launched their own version of this on 9 July 2026. ChatGPT Work is the same idea, an agent that works across your apps and files and hands back finished documents instead of chat. It runs on GPT-5.6, and there’s a desktop app that bundles chat, Work and Codex together, which will sound familiar.
It’s newer and a bit rougher out of the gate. Jez runs on Claude, so that’s what the rest of this series is built on, but the shape is the same whichever camp you’re in. Nothing you learn here is wasted if you go the other way.
Why the AI agent starter kit is this short
Because the AI was never the hard part.
The models are brilliant and basically a commodity now. Anthropic, OpenAI and Google leapfrog each other every few months, and the gap at the top matters less with every release. What’s actually hard is connecting them to the stuff you already use. Your accounts. Your systems. Your real work.
The ready made connectors get you most of the way for free, which is why the shopping list is only five items long. The custom ones are where it gets interesting, and that’s next time, because Troy’s setup needed a fair bit more than what’s on the shelf.
Want a hand setting yours up?
If you’d like someone to get Claude connected to your accounts, your inbox and the tools you run day to day, that’s the sort of thing Jez does. Have a look at the web design and SEO services on offer or request a quote and Jez will walk you through the setup, or handle the lot from start to finish.
