Would that drive business gains, or would it be a pure waste?
First of all, if your answer is the latter, there is something seriously wrong with your business strategy.
My development team worked all night to deliver a product to my customer. There were mental ups and downs, personal drama, epic victories… No, that's probably a bit too far-fetched. Those were a few AI agents backed by Qwen3.8-Flash-Next running on my local server.
No big deal, I am just showing off. Or am I?
The truth is that “smart” open-source models running locally on economically justifiable hardware are slow. Naturally, you can choose smaller models for semi-real-time performance. That would sacrifice output quality, but it is fine for some use cases, and there are ways to mitigate the intelligence loss.
For serious tasks with multiple dependencies and unknown unknowns, there is no easy way around it. You are better off using the best model that your hardware can handle and accepting the inferior token generation speed.
The missing ingredient is the orchestration software that manages and keeps those AI agents alive (and busy). That software is called harness, and there are several products available on the market.
I prefer to have full control over my agentic team, so I decided to build a tailored solution leveraging the Pi SDK. I used Pi's connectors and other building blocks to build a software company leveraging my professional experience. As a solo contributor, I deliver work that previously required a whole IT department.
Now let’s go back to your business. Agents can perform several tasks; they are not limited to software development. With properly defined access levels and strong guardrails, that team can support any business case, and it can do that 24/7/365. The question is whether those agents earn enough to cover the cost of used tokens. And those agents will burn tokens like there is no tomorrow…
Even better, what if your mission-critical business process depends on an external AI API that goes down in the middle of the night? You can have a backup provider and design your solution to reroute the traffic.
Or you can utilize local hardware that generates tokens even if the internet is down (by the way, a backup AI provider won’t solve your internet outage).
Yes, I also see all the hype and marketing slop around AI, but that should not mislead you. There is an actual business value in establishing internal agentic departments. It requires some experience and planning (as with anything worthwhile), but the benefits are real.
👉 Would you make that AI team drive business gains, or would it be a pure waste?