AI Agents in Action: Small Wins That Make Big Impact — What Will You Build?

[Nick Derbawka]

I was on a call with a customer who told me that, in some months, their HR team receives over 100,000 cases by email, funneled through more than 200 shared inboxes. The volume alone sounds overwhelming, but the real problem is how those cases are created. The Inbound Action rule they have in place takes the email subject line and uses it as the case’s Short Description.

Think about subject lines like “Re: Fwd: Payroll question from last week” or “URGENT!!!”. Not very helpful. The result is that every case enters the system with a label that doesn’t actually describe the issue. At this customer, their Tier 1 HR team has to waste countless hours every week clicking into each one just to figure out what it’s about, slowing response time and adding unnecessary frustration.

That got me thinking: how could AI Agents help here?

So I built a simple one to test the idea. Instead of relying on the subject line, the AI Agent I created reviews the email content that gets stored in the case Description, summarizes the intent into a single line of 100 characters or less, and populates the Short Description with something clear and actionable.

Now, instead of nonsensical subject lines in the Short Descriptions, the case list looks like this:

• “Overtime pay missing from paycheck”

• “Request to update benefits after marriage”

• “Question about incorrect tax withholdings”

It’s a small change, but the impact is immediate. Cases are easier to scan, easier to triage, and faster to resolve. Multiply that by thousands of cases a month, and you start to see real-time savings.

The bigger point is that AI Agents don’t have to be huge, sweeping projects.  I built this in under an hour. You don’t need to start with an end-to-end transformation. Look for the small, tactical wins — the places where people are re-typing, re-summarizing, or cleaning up messy data. Those are the perfect entry points to build trust and prove value.

That’s my example. Now I’d love to hear yours. Where in your processes do you see inefficiencies that an AI Agent could tackle? Share your ideas. I’ll try to build a few and post demo videos back, or we can get on a call and design your first AI Agent together.