Follow Your Data

I've watched a lot of owners buy software the way people buy boats. They see a great demo on a sunny day, picture themselves at the wheel, and sign. Six months later the thing sits in the driveway under a tarp because nobody figured out how to get it to the water.

Agents are about to get bought the same way.

Look at the calendar. Meta launched Muse on September 8 and then pointed it straight at owners with Muse for Small Business on September 29. That same day OpenAI rolled out Dots, always on agent coworkers with their own cloud computer and browser. Google announced its Gemini agent for Workspace on October 8. Anthropic opened the Claude Duet research preview on October 21.

Four of the biggest companies on earth, four agents that keep working after you log off, all inside about seven weeks. We've covered several of them one at a time. This time I want to figure out which one, if any, actually gets a desk in your business.

My short answer: follow your data.

Honestly, all of these agents are smart enough now. Smarts aren't what's holding anyone back. Put the same task in front of Muse, a Dot, Duet and Gemini, and the writing, reasoning and planning will land in roughly the same neighborhood.

What separates them is reach. An agent can only act on what it can see and touch. If your leads live in Go High Level, your books live in QuickBooks, your email lives in Gmail and your ads live in Meta, then the agent that plugs into those four natively will beat a smarter agent that has to fumble through a browser to reach them.

I call this data gravity. Moving data is expensive and syncing it is annoying, and every copy you make starts going stale right away. So bring the agent to the data.

Here's what each one can reach today, from what the companies have actually published.

Muse for Small Business. Connects to Meta ad accounts, Facebook Pages and Instagram professional account analytics, plus Shopify, HighLevel, QuickBooks, Klaviyo, Stripe, Slack, Notion, Canva, Dropbox, Asana, Box, Figma, Zoom and a few more. Free with usage limits, with paid plans for more usage. If your business runs on Meta ads, nothing else sits this close to that data.

OpenAI Dots. Each Dot gets its own cloud computer and browser and can connect to more than 4,000 apps through OpenAI's plugins. It talks to you through ChatGPT, Slack and Microsoft Teams. The first Dot is included for Pro and Business Premium customers. OpenAI hasn't said what extra Dots cost.

Claude Duet. More than 6,000 connectors in the Claude Marketplace, including Gmail, Slack, QuickBooks, HubSpot, Docusign and Gusto. It scans your email and calendar each morning and hands back finished files. Right now it's US only, Pro and Max only, by waitlist, and Anthropic says plainly that it doesn't work with Microsoft 365.

Gemini agent. You @mention it inside Gmail, Docs, Sheets, Slides and Chat. Google says it runs each job on the model that fits best, which today includes both Gemini and Claude models. It's in private preview, with wider availability promised soon for select Workspace Business and Enterprise plans.

See how the "best" agent changed four times in four paragraphs? It all depends on where your stuff lives.

This takes about 45 minutes with a coffee and your actual login screens open. Don't do it from memory. Owners always forget at least one system, usually the spreadsheet the office manager built in 2021 that quietly runs half the company.

Copy this into a doc or a sheet.

A few rules for scoring honestly.

When you're done, the winner is usually obvious. If two agents are within a few points, pick the one your team already opens every day.

These are hypothetical, but I've sat across the table from every one of these owners more times than I can count.

Eight trucks. Gmail and Google Calendar for the office, Go High Level for leads and follow up, QuickBooks for the books, Meta and Google ads bringing in water heater and repipe jobs.

Gmail and QuickBooks both carry weight 3. Duet reaches both natively and the morning email scan fits a dispatcher's day perfectly. Muse reaches HighLevel, QuickBooks and the Meta ad account, which matters a lot heading into winter, when frozen pipes and water heater swaps are the money makers. Gemini agent would live right inside Gmail and Sheets, but it's in private preview, so it scores zero today.

Pick: Muse for the marketing side, because it sits on the ad account and the CRM at the same time. If the owner is already on Claude Pro or Max and gets off the waitlist, Duet for the inbox. Skip: Dots. Nothing about this shop lives in Teams or needs a separate cloud worker yet. Revisit: when Gemini agent reaches their Workspace plan, because that one would sit where the office manager already spends her day.

Twelve people. Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, a practice management system and a lot of client PDFs.

Duet is out on day one because it doesn't work with Microsoft 365. Muse's connector list is built for marketing and commerce, so it scores low here. Dots talk through Teams and connect through OpenAI's plugins. Gemini agent lists Microsoft 365 as a place you can reach it, but it's still in preview.

Pick: a Dot, if they're on a plan that includes one, or whatever Copilot setup they're already paying for. Put it on one job first, like chasing missing client documents before deadlines. Skip: Duet and Muse. Revisit: if Anthropic adds Microsoft 365 support or Gemini agent goes wide.

Three people, a warehouse partner, Shopify, Klaviyo, Meta ads doing most of the heavy lifting, Stripe and Slack.

This one isn't close. Muse for Small Business connects to Shopify, Klaviyo, Stripe, Slack and the Meta ad account. Everything with weight 3 sits in its lap.

Pick: Muse. Skip: chasing every new agent launch. Watch: Meta's terms. When the company selling you ads also runs the agent reading your sales data, read the data settings slowly and decide what you're comfortable with before you click connect.

None of those picks came from watching a demo.

Most owners skip this part. I'd do it anyway.

These agents are rented employees. The companies behind them will change prices, rename plans, merge features and shut things down. We've watched it happen month after month this fall. So set things up so switching agents takes a weekend.

Two rules.

Rule one. Own your data. Your records live in systems you control and can export. The CRM stays the CRM. Files live in Drive, SharePoint or Notion. Relationship history lives in something like Mesh (the CRM formerly called Clay), not in some agent's memory. The agent reads and writes to those systems. It doesn't get to be the place the records live.

Rule two. Own your instructions. Every agent needs a brief: what it's allowed to touch, how you talk to customers, what needs approval, what's off limits. Write that once in a plain doc you keep. Then paste it into whichever agent you're renting this quarter. If you switch, the brief comes with you and you're not starting from scratch. If you did Tuesday's go bag audit, you already have most of this sitting in your folder.

The glue between systems, the stuff like "when a deal closes in High Level, create the job folder and ping the crew lead," belongs in Make.com, where you can see every step and swap out the AI piece without rebuilding the whole workflow. Call notes from Fathom should land in your files too, instead of living only inside one vendor's app.

Here's a starter brief. Fill in the brackets, save it somewhere you own, and you'll never write it twice.

Some of those "always ask" rules are already built into the products. Duet pauses for approval on payments, signing documents and deletions, and blocks moving money outright. I'd still write them into your brief. Product defaults change, and your brief shouldn't change just because a vendor's did.

The problem with a stretch like the last seven weeks is that every launch looks urgent. You'll be tempted to move your whole operation every time someone posts a slick video.

Don't.

Set a 90 minute block once a quarter. Call it Agent Review. Pull out your scorecard, rescore with whatever actually shipped, and decide whether anything changed enough to switch. Between reviews, you read the news, note what's interesting and keep running the business.

What should make you switch early? Only three things.

A new benchmark chart isn't on that list. Neither is your buddy's LinkedIn post.

Block the hour. Phone face down.

Minutes 0 to 10. List every system your business runs on. Open the login screens. Find the secret spreadsheet.

Minutes 10 to 30. Fill in the scorecard. Weight first, then score each agent honestly. Zeros for anything that's preview, waitlist or "coming soon" on your plan.

Minutes 30 to 45. Write version one of your agent brief. It'll be rough. Write it anyway. You'll fix it the first time the agent gets something wrong, and it will.

Minutes 45 to 55. Pick one agent and give it one job. The morning inbox summary, the weekly ad account check, chasing missing documents. Something you'd notice if it went wrong.

Minutes 55 to 60. Put the quarterly Agent Review on your calendar for early February. Then close the laptop and go enjoy your Sunday.

If you track your hours in Rize, tag the time you spend on that one job for two weeks before and after you hand it over. Then you'll know whether the agent actually saved you time.

Fill in the data gravity scorecard with your real login screens open, not from memory.

Score preview and waitlist agents as zero until they're actually in your account.

Write version one of your agent brief and save it somewhere you own.

Give one agent one job and keep a human approval on anything customer facing.

Put a 90 minute Agent Review on the calendar for early February and ignore launch hype until then.

Jordan

The AI Newsroom | Practical AI for people with a business to run.