Valentina Akpan: Founder, Rellatech. Admin and technical virtual assistant for businesses and startups with teams.
PYMNTS reported this week that Levi Strauss and Co. has built specialized AI agents across HR, finance, IT, and retail operations, and is now building a Super Agent that ties them together into a single interface. A Microsoft customer story describes it plainly: an employee asking about inventory or starting an HR process reaches the right system through one entry point, without needing to know which tool sits behind it.
The order matters more than the headline. Levi's built the specialized agents first, then added the orchestration layer once there was something worth orchestrating.
The same problem, at a smaller scale
A business with three or ten people has the same shape of problem. The CRM does not talk to the inbox, the invoicing tool does not talk to the calendar, the lead form drops into one place and the follow-up sits in another, and every new tool added creates one more gap where things fall through. What looks like a strategy question is really a plumbing question.
Levi's can afford to solve that with a chief digital officer, a Microsoft partnership, and an internal team building a Super Agent. Most companies I work with cannot, and would not need to even if they could. At small scale, another platform on top of the platforms rarely helps; what helps is a person who manages the connections.
Where the software still needs judgment
PYMNTS Intelligence found that 43 percent of CFOs said agentic AI could have a high impact on dynamic budget planning, and nearly half already use AI to monitor working capital and cash flows. Ramp launched Applied AI Solutions in June, aimed at workflows that span multiple systems and need judgment when exceptions occur. That last part is the interesting admission: software is getting better at running the happy path, and it still struggles the moment something does not fit the pattern.
At a small business, that judgment still has to come from a human, at least for now, and it needs someone who notices when a Keap tag stopped firing, when a Zapier task is failing with no alert, and when a HubSpot deal is stuck in a stage because the automation is looking for a field that no longer exists. Agents cannot flag what they are not designed to look for.
What that looks like on my retainers
Across my retainers, this is most of the work. Wiring HubSpot into Keap through Zapier or Make so a lead captured on the website actually reaches the sales inbox with the right tags, cleaning up the fields so the automation has something to match against, and building the small guardrails that catch exceptions before a client feels them. None of it is glamorous and none of it sounds like a Super Agent, but it is the version of orchestration a small business can actually afford.
As a CRM and automation specialist, my job is to keep the connections working, keep the data clean enough for automation to trust it, and use judgment on the exceptions the software cannot handle. It is the same operator layer Levi's built internally, sized down for a business that needs one person on retainer instead of a program office.
Work with Rellatech
If your stack already has more tools than connections, adding another platform won't fix it. Wiring an existing stack together is a regular part of what I do. See how the retainers are structured, or a short call is the fastest way to see whether it's a fit.
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