The Question Most People Get Wrong
If you were starting your AI team from scratch today, which agents would you hire first?
Most people answer this by picking tools. They go for the one with the best demo, the flashiest feature, or the one they saw in a YouTube short last week. That is the wrong answer — and it is why most people get stuck.
The right question is not “which tool is best?” It is “what does my business actually need to get done, and who do I need to do it?”
James ran a live session on exactly this. Here is the framework he uses — and the mental model behind it.
Start With an Orchestrator, Not an Employee
The first hire is not a doer. It is a coordinator.
Think of it like a waterfall with locks — the kind you see on a river. Each lock has one gate. Water only moves through when the gate opens. If you only have one gate, everything has to go through one at a time. You are the bottleneck.
An orchestrator is what opens all the gates at once. It knows which employees you have, what tools they can use, and what order tasks need to run. You talk to one person. They run the business.
James calls his Dean. When he opens a session, he just says “Hey Dean” — and Dean reads the business instructions, checks the memory, looks at the goals, and gets oriented. All of that happens before James types a single task.
“I only converse with Dean. He understands all the departments, all the employees, and what skills they have. If I ask him to complete something, he figures out what skills are needed, what tools are needed, and what memory is needed to get it done.”
Without an orchestrator, you are the one routing every task. You are doing the job the chief of staff should be doing.
The 4-Department Structure
Once you have an orchestrator, the next step is breaking your business into departments. James uses four:
- Marketing Manager — content, social media, YouTube, email, newsletters
- Sales Manager — outbound pipeline, offers, follow-up
- Education Manager — courses, member onboarding, live sessions
- Community Manager — campus engagement, discussion posts, member support
You do not have to use these four. You could organize by client, by project, or by business function. The point is that departments allow each group of employees to have their own rules, their own memory, and their own workflows — without crossing wires.
A marketing employee should not be writing persuasive sales copy. A sales employee should not be designing curriculum. When you separate them into departments, each one knows exactly what it is good at, what it is responsible for, and how it hands off to the next person.
“Each department has the rules for all the employees in that department, the memories, and the workflows. If I tell the marketing manager to do social media for the week, it knows all the tools, all the employees it needs, and the recipe to follow.”
The 3 Memory Layers Every Team Needs
Employees are only as good as what they know. Without memory, every task starts from zero. With memory, the team gets smarter every time it works.
There are three layers:
Layer 1 — The Filing Cabinet (Static Memory)
This is the bedrock. It lives in a set of files that do not change often — your ideal customer profile, your offers, your business goals, your tools list, your brand voice. Every employee reads this before doing anything. It is how they know who they are working for and what the business is trying to do.
Layer 2 — The Living Memory (Working Memory)
This is a running log of what has been done. Every time an agent completes a task, it writes what worked, what did not, and what to remember next time. It is called memory.md — a plain text file that grows over time. The next time a similar task comes up, the agent references it and does not repeat the same mistake.
Layer 3 — The Wiki (Long-Term Knowledge Base)
This is the indexed library. Not just what happened last week, but everything — six months ago, a year ago. Every output, every discovery, every piece of context your team has ever built. When an agent needs to create something, it can search the wiki and pull relevant material instead of starting from scratch or guessing from the internet.
“Whoever has the most context wins. If you have more context than anyone, that context is available to you through any of those agents.”
What Happens When You Add Connectors
Skills and workflows are powerful. But without connectors, they hand you a piece of paper at the end.
A connector is what lets an agent reach outside the conversation and actually do something — add a contact to your CRM, post to your community, send an email, create a course lesson. Without it, the agent creates the content and stops. You copy and paste the rest.
With connectors, the handoff is automatic. The outbound sales agent finds a prospect, researches them, scores them, writes the outreach, and adds them to your CRM — without you touching any of it.
James uses connectors for WordPress (where he keeps all his data), FluentCRM, FluentCommunity, Apify for research, Firecrawl for web scraping, and YouTube Transcript for his content pipeline. Each one removes a manual step from a workflow.
You do not need all of them at once. Start with the connector for wherever you store your most important data — your CRM, your LMS, your community. That is where the biggest manual work lives.
The Workflow You Should Build First
Before you hire any agents, write down what you already do — manually, in what order.
If you were going to hand this off to a VA, what would you tell them? What is the output at each step? What tools do they need access to? What does “done” look like?
That is your first workflow. The agent version of it is just that same set of instructions, with tools connected so the handoffs happen automatically.
James’s suggestion for most educators, coaches, and consultants:
- Start with the workflow you do the most often — and hate the most
- Write out every step as if you were training a new hire
- Identify which steps need external tools (email, CRM, community, calendar)
- Build employees for each step — specialists, not generalists
- Wire them together with connectors so the handoff is automatic
- Add it to Dean so you can trigger the whole thing with one sentence
The Agents James Would Hire First
Based on the session, here is the priority order for most educators and coaches:
1. The Orchestrator (Dean) — hire this first, always. Without it, you are doing the routing yourself.
2. The Marketing Manager — content repurposing, social media, newsletters. This is where most educators spend the most time on tasks that agents handle well.
3. The Education Manager — course creation, member onboarding, session prep. The work closest to what you actually do.
4. The Sales Agent — outbound pipeline, prospect research, outreach. The work that generates revenue but most educators avoid doing manually.
5. The Community Manager — daily posts, member engagement, Q&A monitoring. Keeps the campus alive without you having to show up every day.
You do not have to build all five. Start with one department, get the workflow right, then add the next one.
Knowing What You Want Done Is the Real Skill
Prompt engineering used to be the thing. Get the right words in the right order and the AI does what you want.
That is becoming less important. What matters now is knowing clearly what you want the end result to be — and being able to describe it out loud.
As AI moves toward voice interaction, the person who wins is the one who can say exactly what they need. Not the one with the best prompt template.
Write down the outputs you want from your business. The finished things. Not “I want to use AI” — but “I want 15 qualified leads researched and scored every week” or “I want every YouTube video turned into a tutorial, three social posts, a community discussion, and an email to my list.”
Those are the instructions your AI team runs on.
Your Next Step
Pick one workflow. Write it out in plain English — step by step, the way you would explain it to a new hire. That document is the foundation of your first agent.
Once you have that, you will know which employees you need, which tools they require, and how the whole thing connects.
The Campus AI OS is a ready-built version of this structure — orchestrator, four departments, three memory layers, and over 280 skills available to install. If you want a head start, it installs as a plugin and walks you through setup.
The free version gives you the structure. The paid version adds the employees. Either way, you are starting with a working foundation instead of building it from scratch.
