I built boring AI agents for a food distributor. They worked better than the hype stuff.

I helped automate parts of a family friend’s foodservice wholesale distribution business in Dallas, Texas. They sell to restaurants, cafes, small grocery stores, bakeries, cloud kitchens, and local retail shops. They ran everything manually. Just a normal wholesale business running on Excel, phone calls, texts, emails, and manual follow-ups. Before this, their process was basically: * manually find new restaurants and retailers * send inconsistent cold emails * track inventory in Excel * follow up through texts and phone calls * manually check low stock * guess which products were moving fastest * ask people for sales updates * no CRM * no dashboards So I built boring agents for boring work. First Agent: Find Local Business Used google maps scrapers for finding local businesses in our nearby area. Used all the zip codes in my area and added them to the scraper. Second agent: Copy Writer Scraped the youtube transcript for all the youtube videos using Apify on writing cold email copy and made a Chat GPT project which writes copy for us. We segment out copy based on different pain points of our customers. Tried to write short copy with no links. Third agent: Email Finder and Verifier We find the emails for the businesses using Apollo and Apify email finder. Then we use Million Verifier to verify them. Forth agent: Email Sending We set up inboxes on Aerosend and let them warm up for 3 weeks. After that period we add the inboxes to smartlead and set up campaigns there. Both of them have very good API docs and the whole process was automated Fifth agent: Handled Inventory Signals. Nothing complex at first. Just: * low-stock alerts * reorder suggestions * fast-moving SKU tracking * slow-moving SKU tracking * basic margin visibility * daily inventory dashboards Before the system, they were doing about $22K/month. After 4 months, they were around $45K/month. Roughly 2x in 4 months. Other changes: * leads contacted went from about 120/month to 1,500+/month * verified local leads added averaged around 900/month * positive replies averaged around 55/month * new customers went from 3–4/month to 12–15/month * manual admin work dropped by around 60% * follow-ups stopped falling through the cracks * inventory decisions became much less guessy The lesson for me was pretty simple: Instead of building fancy agents that never work, just build the simple stuff. Build: lead generation → cold email → reply handling → follow-ups → inventory alerts → dashboards I think a lot of agent value is hiding in businesses like foodservice distribution, CPG, packaging supply, restaurant supply, medical supply, and industrial wholesale. Boring agents for boring businesses might be a better market than most of the hype stuff.