Episode 12: The hidden beauty of AI agents

This summer, we moved house.

Everyone knows a move means stress and a heavy extra workload. It pays to be well organised, because it’s a substantial job all the same.

So, naturally, I came up with an agent to help us.

Once you’ve understood how an agent works, it’s easy to picture everything you can do with one. Yes, it takes a certain rigour: structuring the approach, defining the working method, the scope it operates in, the rules it must follow. But once you’ve been through the exercise a few times, the routine becomes clear. And the key thing, as we’ve seen throughout these chronicles, is the objective you set it.

The result is quite extraordinary.

First, the planning. What are all the stages we’ll go through? In what order should we tackle them? How do we make sure we don’t forget anything?

Then, the new home. That’s where we were bowled over. We were having alterations done on top of the move, and the questions kept coming. Which wood floor to choose? Where to put the furniture? Fit the new kitchen on top of the flooring, or bring the flooring up flush with it? This is where its ability to learn, to draw on everything we have to hand, comes into its own. The photos. The architect’s plan. The specifications of what we want to install: for the flooring, say, how much pressure it can withstand and how far you can lay it without an expansion joint. The agent looks for information wherever it can, and becomes our guide to the whole layout.

“Right, I’d like to see my living room with dark flooring, if we take out the wall between the kitchen and the living room, with the furniture I already have.” I give it the photos and the architect’s plan. It sketches out the different scenarios for us.

Then it finds us the tradespeople: a painter (a local firm with good references), an electrician, a plumber. It writes the brief for each trade, setting out exactly what we expect of them. It advises us and guides us through the installation.

Then comes the admin. That part is brilliant, and it shows the value of having good-quality data to hand. The agent found every organisation I had to notify of my change of address. It worked out by itself that we had to contact the road traffic office to have the vehicle registration document reissued, as well as all our insurers, the banks, the utility companies and the residents’ registration office. In the place you’re moving to, you have to go in person. In the place you’re leaving, you can write. For each letter, it dug the policy number and the file reference out of the contracts. It drafted the letters and printed them for me, and all I had to do was slip them into envelopes. For the ones we could reach by email, it prepared the emails.

I can tell you, at a moment when the work piles up so high that you could easily lose the plot, it makes all the difference. It saves us a ridiculous amount of time.

So there it is, the hidden beauty of agents. Yes, sometimes they do things that strike us as absurd, or that annoy us. The time saved more than makes up for it. So does something else, quieter: a crutch, something you can lean on, which helps us sleep better at night. Because you feel you’ve done everything that needed doing.

Laurent Cuénoud, founder of Djtal, September 2026