AI Agents

AI Agent Development

Autonomous software that does the multi-step work — not another chatbot that answers questions

A chatbot talks. An agent acts. The difference is whether the software can look at a task, decide what to do, use your tools to actually do it, check its own work, and hand you a finished result. We build agents that pull from your systems, take real actions inside them, and know when to stop and ask a human. No demos that fall apart the second real data hits them — production agents wired into the software you already run.

Why it matters

The gap between a clever demo and an agent you can actually trust with the work

Almost anyone can wire a language model to a prompt and call it an agent. Getting it to reliably complete a ten-step task against your real data — pulling the right record, calling the right API, handling the case that doesn't fit the pattern, and not quietly inventing an answer when it's unsure — is a different job entirely. That job is software engineering, not prompt writing.

Picture a customer-intake agent. An email lands; it reads the request, finds the matching account in your CRM, checks eligibility against your rules, drafts a response, and either sends it or routes it to a person when the stakes are high. That single workflow touches three of your systems and a dozen decisions — and every one is a place a flimsy agent guesses wrong. A real one has three parts most demos skip. It has tool use: the ability to actually reach into your CRM, database, ticketing system, or payment platform and both read and write. It has planning: the ability to break a goal into steps, pick an order, and adapt when a step fails instead of charging ahead. And it has guardrails: the judgment to escalate to a human at the exact points where being wrong is expensive.

Here's the honest part most agencies won't tell you. Agents are not always the right answer. If a task is deterministic — same inputs, same steps, every time — a plain automation is cheaper, faster, and more reliable, and we'll build you that instead. Agents earn their keep on the messy work: judgment calls, unstructured inputs, tasks where the path changes case to case. We build the right tool for the job, and we'll say so when an agent isn't it.

What's actually under the hood

What separates an agent that works from one that just demos

Connecting the agent to the systems where your work actually lives

An agent that can't touch your systems is just a smarter search box. The real value comes from wiring it into the software you already run — reading records, calling APIs, and writing results back — so it completes tasks instead of describing them. We build typed, permissioned tools around each integration so the agent can only take the actions you've explicitly allowed, and every call is logged.

  1. Read/write integrations with CRMs, ERPs, ticketing, and databases
  2. Typed tool definitions with strict input validation
  3. Scoped permissions so agents can only touch what they should
  4. Full audit logging of every tool call the agent makes
  5. Fallback handling when an external system errors or times out

Breaking a goal into steps — and recovering when a step goes sideways

Multi-step work is where naive agents fall apart: they lose the thread, repeat themselves, or barrel past a failed step. We design orchestration that gives the agent a clear plan, memory of what it has already done, and the ability to retry, branch, or hand off when something breaks. For complex jobs we split work across specialized agents instead of asking one agent to do everything.

  1. Task decomposition into ordered, checkable steps
  2. State and memory so the agent knows what it's already done
  3. Retry, branch, and graceful-failure logic on every step
  4. Multi-agent handoffs for jobs too big for one loop
  5. Deterministic sub-steps used wherever an LLM isn't needed

Knowing exactly when to stop and put a person in the loop

The fastest way to lose trust in an agent is to let it take an irreversible or high-stakes action unsupervised. We map the decision points where being wrong is expensive — a refund, a contract, a customer-facing email, a data deletion — and route those to a human for approval, while the agent handles everything routine on its own. You set the threshold; the agent respects it.

  1. Approval gates on high-stakes and irreversible actions
  2. Confidence thresholds that trigger escalation to a person
  3. Clear handoff context so the human can decide in seconds
  4. Configurable autonomy — tighten or loosen as trust builds
  5. Every human decision fed back to improve the agent

Proving the agent works before it touches a real customer

An agent you can't measure is an agent you can't trust. We build evaluation suites that run the agent against real and adversarial cases, track how often it succeeds, and catch regressions before they ship. In production we monitor every run, flag anomalies, and keep humans able to see exactly what the agent did and why — no black box.

  1. Evaluation suites over real and edge-case inputs
  2. Success-rate tracking and regression testing on every change
  3. Grounding and citation so the agent can't invent facts unchecked
  4. Live monitoring, tracing, and anomaly alerts in production
  5. Cost and latency controls so runs stay affordable
An engineering shop, not a consultancy

The build-and-ship track record behind every agent we deploy

3.1B
search impressions earned for our clients
43M
clicks driven to client websites
4.5M
keywords ranked across client sites
1.2M
pages ranked in Google
The agent stack

What we build agents with

Agents that actually reach into your tools and get work done.

OpenAI
OpenAI Reasoning
Anthropic
Anthropic Reasoning
LangChain
LangChain Framework
LangGraph
LangGraph Orchestration
Python
Python Core
FastAPI
FastAPI APIs
n8n
n8n Workflows
Zapier
Zapier Connectors
Make
Make Connectors
Slack
Slack Interface
Notion
Notion Data
Airtable
Airtable Data
Sheets
Sheets Data
Twilio
Twilio Comms
How we work

How a Swarm agent engagement runs

01

We find out whether you even need an agent

We start by mapping the task, the systems it touches, and the cost of getting it wrong. If a deterministic automation would do the job better, we say so. If an agent is the right call, we scope exactly what it will and won't do.

Task and workflow mapping

The real steps, edge cases, and hand-offs a human does today.

Agent-vs-automation call

An honest read on whether AI judgment is actually required.

Success criteria

What 'working' means, measured before we write a line.

02

We architect the tools, the plan, and the guardrails

Before building, we design the agent's tool set, its planning loop, and the exact points where a human stays in control. This is where we decide what the agent can touch, how it recovers from failure, and what it must escalate.

Tool and integration design

Every system the agent reads from or writes to, scoped and typed.

Orchestration plan

How the goal breaks into steps and what happens when one fails.

Escalation map

The decisions that route to a person instead of the model.

03

We build it and wire it into your stack

This is the step consultancies can't do — we're engineers, so we ship the working software. The agent gets built, connected to your live systems, tested in staging against real cases, and deployed with monitoring from day one.

Production build

Real code, real integrations — not a no-code prototype.

Staging validation

Run against real and adversarial cases before go-live.

Monitored rollout

Deployed with tracing, alerts, and a rollback plan.

04

We watch it in the wild and make it better

Agents meet inputs in production they never saw in testing. We monitor every run, review escalations, tighten the weak spots, and expand autonomy as the agent earns it — so it gets more capable and more trusted over time.

Run monitoring

Success rates, costs, and anomalies watched continuously.

Escalation review

Human decisions fed back to sharpen the agent's judgment.

Expanding autonomy

More handled unsupervised as reliability proves out.

The difference

We ship the agent into production — you don't get a strategy deck and a phone number for a developer

Most AI firms are consultancies that will advise you on agents, sketch a roadmap, and leave the building to someone else. We're an engineering shop that added AI to a real build practice. The engagement doesn't end in a slide deck — it ends with a working agent wired into your systems, monitored, and doing the job. And if someone AI-prototyped or vibe-coded an agent that half-works, we're one of the few shops that will rebuild it into software you can actually run.

Talk to an engineer who builds
By industry

Where agents earn their keep looks different in every business

Operations-Heavy Businesses

The back office is full of multi-step work that's too messy for a rigid automation but too repetitive for a person: reconciling records, chasing missing data, routing exceptions.

We build ops agents that pull from your systems, resolve the routine cases end to end, and escalate only the genuine exceptions — turning a queue that ate hours a day into one a person only touches when judgment is actually needed.

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SaaS & Tech

SaaS teams drown in support triage, onboarding steps, and internal tooling requests that pull engineers off the roadmap to answer the same questions and run the same runbooks.

We build agents that triage and resolve support tickets against your docs and database, walk new users through setup, and execute internal runbooks — with escalation to a human the moment a request leaves safe, known territory.

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Professional Services

Firms bill for judgment but lose hours to the work around it — intake, document review, research, and drafting first passes that a person still has to start from scratch.

We build intake and research agents that gather client information, pull and summarize the relevant documents, and draft a reviewable first version — leaving the billable judgment to your people while the grind gets done for them.

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E-commerce

Storefronts run on repetitive decisions at volume: answering pre-sale questions, handling returns and order issues, and keeping product data clean across a catalog that never stops changing.

We build agents that resolve order and return inquiries against your real order system, enrich and fix product data at scale, and hand off to a human on anything touching a refund or a policy exception — so service scales without the headcount.

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Logistics

Logistics lives on exceptions — delayed shipments, mismatched documents, carrier back-and-forth — the exact unstructured, case-by-case work that breaks deterministic automation.

We build agents that track shipments across carrier systems, reconcile documents that don't line up, and draft the follow-ups to resolve exceptions, escalating the ones that need a dispatcher's call instead of guessing.

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Finance

Finance teams run high-stakes, repeatable processes — invoice matching, reconciliation, compliance checks — where accuracy is non-negotiable and a wrong autonomous action is unacceptable.

We build agents that match invoices, reconcile transactions, and flag anomalies against your ledgers, with strict human-approval gates on anything that moves money — automation on the routine, a person on every decision that matters.

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What you get

What you actually walk away with

A working agent in production

Real software wired into your systems and doing the job — not a prototype, a pilot, or a slide deck.

Guardrails you control

Approval gates, escalation rules, and scoped permissions so the agent stays inside the lines you set.

Full visibility

Every action traced and logged, with monitoring and eval suites so you can see and trust what it did.

An engineer on the other end

Ongoing iteration from the team that built it — expanding autonomy as the agent proves itself.

Common questions

Frequently Asked Questions

What's the difference between an AI agent and a chatbot or automation?

A chatbot answers questions in a conversation. A rigid automation runs the same fixed steps every time. An agent sits in between and does what neither can: it takes a goal, decides the steps, uses your tools to actually carry them out, and adapts when a step fails or an input doesn't fit the pattern. If your task is a fixed sequence, we'll build an automation — it's cheaper and more reliable. Agents are for the messy, judgment-heavy work.

How do you keep an agent from doing something wrong or making things up?

Three ways. We scope its permissions so it can only take actions you've explicitly allowed. We put human-approval gates on anything high-stakes or irreversible, so a person signs off before money moves or a customer is contacted. And we ground its answers in your real data with citations, plus run evaluation suites that catch regressions before they ship. Every action is logged and traceable — no black box.

Will an agent replace my team?

In practice it takes the repetitive multi-step grind off their plate — the reconciling, chasing, triaging, and first-draft work — so they spend their time on the judgment calls the agent escalates to them. We design the escalation points specifically so people stay in control of the decisions that matter. It's leverage for your team, not a replacement for their judgment.

How is Swarm different from an AI consultancy?

A consultancy advises you on agents and hands off the building. We're an engineering shop that added AI to an existing build practice, so we do the part that's actually hard: writing the software, wiring it into your live systems, testing it, and shipping it to production with monitoring. The engagement ends with a working agent, not a roadmap. We also rebuild AI-prototyped or 'vibe-coded' agents into production-grade software — something almost nobody else offers.

How do you connect an agent to the systems we already use?

Through their APIs. We build typed, permissioned tools around each system — your CRM, database, ticketing, or payment platform — so the agent can read and write only what you've approved, with every call validated and logged. If a system has no clean API, our web and integration teams can build the connective layer. It's the same integration work we do across our website development practice.

How long does it take and how do we start?

We start with a scoping conversation to map the task and decide honestly whether an agent is even the right tool. A focused, well-scoped agent can go from design to a monitored production rollout in a matter of weeks; broader multi-agent systems take longer. We build the highest-value use case first, prove it works, then expand — so you see real results before committing to more.

Get started

Find out what an agent could actually do for you

Book a consultation and we'll map one real workflow, tell you honestly whether an agent or a simpler automation is the right tool, and scope exactly what we'd build. Engineers who ship working software — not consultants who hand you a deck.