Intro⌗

A group of engineers and operators I’ve known for years recently shipped an AI agent platform for professional services. They are also my friends.

Tallahassee is a small place. The Tallahassee technology community…is even smaller. So, one way or the other, you bump into people. I first bumped into Ali during my undergrad years, when I was running around doing random projects in VR and “emerging tech”. Even back then, it was incredibly obvious he was one of the best engineers I had ever met (almost a decade later, the statement still stands.) A polyglot who picked up languages like it was nothing, understood the actual science in computer science, and almost as importantly, who loved teaching others what he knew, Ali shipped actual and material applications in game development, enterprise applications, and systems at international scale. Also, a good hang. This is also right around when I met Lucas, which uh shows how deep the lore is.

After that, Ali and I stayed in touch, mostly on Discord, especially during Arcvale’s early days. While he went on to work at some of the world’s top software firms, we also kept hanging out online. FSU alumni from different majors (computer science, information systems, IT, and uh theatre), Lucas, Ali and I always brought something different to the table, but we all liked working on the same things. I say all this to set some context, because recently we started working on something together again. Something useful, with complex engineering and systems development behind it, that feels lightweight to the person on the other side. A Sidekick of sorts.

Also, yes, it involves AI. We’ll get into it.

(disclaimer: Lucas and I hold equity in Sidekick Technologies and serve as business advisors and growth partners to the company. I am uh not exactly a neutral observer)

Buzz Words⌗

Okay so what is Sidekick. Full name: Sidekick AI. In short: Sidekick AI is an AI agent platform built for professional services and coordination. It remembers your business, works in your tools, runs on a schedule and checks with you in chat before anything goes out. Buzz words baby.

In the short timeline of the generative flavor of AI, we’ve seen a couple paradigms: the large language model sitting behind a chat window, the tool calling that turned static conversations into dynamic sessions that birthed command line based coding agents, and most recently, the computer-use, web-based agent. Aka an agent with its own persistent environment that can act on the digital world. This is the water that Sidekick swims in.

The user facing side of Sidekick is almost comically intuitive. It’s a chat where you are used to chatting. Slack, WhatsApp, Telegram. Like the original chat bots, you can ask it for info and it’ll reply like a souped up search engine.

But it can also act. As in, create and do things in the digital world. In a chat, you could ask it to review the projections that your finance team put together last quarter, pull the latest numbers from your manufacturing team, and draft an email analyzing the comparison to pass to your business partner, and schedule it to send end of week after you approve. And it’ll do that.

It can also spin up a landing page for your new product. It can check your page analytics and suggest ways to improve your SEO, and, implement them. Or check your calendar for your soonest available 30 minute window and call your accountant to see if they can meet then. It can do all these things, but only if you approve. The underlying principle: people’s lives in business are full of things that should be automated. There’s even more that can’t and shouldn’t be. Sidekick tries to find the first kind, to let people focus on the second.

For the infrastructure freaks out there like me, the plumbing behind this is the more interesting bit. Sidekick uses a proprietary fleet management infrastructure to spin up agents at scale, from user intake to daily operations across isolated environments. It feels like a peek at the future of operations and compute automation, but in our backyard. Agents can be spun up, triaged, and continually refined while maintaining uptime that gives professionals the same feeling of reliability as the cloud software of the SaaS era.

The concept of an agent having its own isolated compute challenges a lot of the ways that software is shipped and operated today, and that has forced the Sidekick team to innovate on everything from server provisioning to domain management. It’s about bringing deterministic systems and engineering rigor to the world of non deterministic models.

It’s really cool. And it’s a credit to Ali and his fellow engineer, Gabe Mendoza (another FSU grad and friend), because they built this from scratch.

AI (philosophically)⌗

So that was the buzz words. Then there’s the philosophy (or politics if you squint). It’s AI. It’s automation. There’s a lot behind it. I’ve been writing about both sides of this particular coin since before I met any of the people mentioned in this piece. But, the boom since ChatGPT dropped (somehow only 4 years ago) has accelerated all the dimensions of this technology, especially the parts that touch material human lives.

I’ve written in the past that I believe in the wonder of technology and the amazing things it can do for humanity. I’ve uh also written about the darker side of it. This continues to be the thin line I tread with AI and I see Sidekick along this exact line. There are plenty of issues with the industry today, and a severe lack of nuanced discussion around the effects of automation and labor displacement. But those things have been true for as long as we’ve been rubbing sticks together to make fire. This doesn’t mean that we stop trying to make fire.

We use nuance and critical thinking and try to be professionals with standards (uh also antitrust would probably help.) My position remains consistent: technology should be used for the wider good, people’s lives can and should be improved with the use of technology, and we should try to educate as many people about it to increase the chances of wider good and not closed monopolies.

Sidekick follows these thoughts. Like I said earlier, the goal is simple: handle the first kind of work, so people can focus on the second.

Conclusion⌗

Sidekick is out in the world and running in early access for people in businesses like consulting, advisory, marketing, and other professional services. It’s also being used by people in industries like manufacturing and professional trades. It’s being used by people in North and South America, in English and in Spanish. They are using it to bring their businesses into the 21st century (literally from paper to spreadsheets), scale operations past themselves (bringing their phone book into a CRM with two messages in a chat box), and to broaden their distribution (creating ads based on their custom analytics).

We think even more people can use it and help improve their work. Nothing about creating a deity in a box, or artificial general intelligence, or ending (saving?) the world. Just the same, boring thing technology can best be used for: removing annoying work, with people doing the things only they can do.

If any of this sounds useful: sidekickai.ca. Sign up for early access and see what a Sidekick can do for your work.