The Task Used to Take 3 Weeks. After One Training Session, It Took 20 Minutes.

Meet Carl.

Every performing arts season, Carl onboards more than 300 independent contractors. Paperwork, signatures, tracking, follow-ups. All of it. It’s the kind of job that only Carl knows how to do at his organization, which is exactly why it takes him about three weeks, every single season.

Then we spent an afternoon in a room with his team, talking about agentic AI. And by the end of that afternoon, the part that gave Carl a headache every time was done in 20 minutes.

Who Carl works for

Carl works at BD Performing Arts, a 70-year-old, roughly $50M nonprofit that runs the most successful performing groups and band competitions of their kind in the country. About 25 full-time staff. During peak season, the org spins up to 300+ seasonal employees and independent contractors.

If you’ve ever run a mid-sized org, you know this shape. A small core doing enormous volumes of work. A handful of people who are the entire institutional memory for critical processes. And a stack of repetitive administrative tasks that eat weeks of that core team’s time, usually the same weeks, every year.

That’s where Carl lives. And that’s where the first agent found him.

What actually happened in the room

We led with education. Not a pitch. Not a demo of a shiny product. Just a working session on how agentic AI actually functions and what it can and can’t do.

Carl was in the room. He started poking at things during the workshop. Then he stood up.

Here’s how Mike, his CEO, describes what happened next:

“He said, ‘Whoa, I can have an agent just recreate these for me very quickly.’ What would take him probably three weeks to generate all of these contracts for individuals, he was able to do in maybe 20 minutes. And he was so excited… it was just seeing the lights turn on for him.”

Three things worth noting about that moment:

Carl didn’t get replaced. Mike said it out loud: “I still needed Carl. He’s invaluable.” What Carl got back was three weeks of his season — time to spend on the parts of his job that require his judgment, not his patience.
BDPA didn’t buy a giant platform. They built one small, specific, useful thing. That was the first agent. Not a company-wide rollout. Not an enterprise contract. One workflow that used to burn three weeks, running in 20 minutes.
All it took was a handful of hours of training. Neither Carl nor Mike had a background in programming or scripting. The team’s IT lead had been skeptical of AI entirely, right up until the epiphany. The point of getting on the same page about how these systems work is that the person closest to the problem is usually the person best positioned to solve it, as long as they know what’s possible.

"He said, 'Whoa, I can have an agent just recreate these for me very quickly.' What would take him probably three weeks to generate all of these contracts for individuals, he was able to do in maybe 20 minutes. And he was so excited... it was just seeing the lights turn on for him."

Mike Stone

CEO, BD Performing Arts

Who's your Carl?

If you’re reading this and wondering whether agentic AI is worth the effort at your org, don’t start with the most exciting problem. Start with the person on your team who does something repetitive, high-volume, and mission-critical; the person you’d hire two more of if you could.

That’s your Carl.

The first agent isn’t supposed to be flashy. It’s supposed to give one specific person a huge chunk of their time back, and give the rest of your team enough proof to start asking, “can AI help me with this?” on the daily.

At BDPA, they now ask that question constantly. It started with one afternoon and one contract onboarding workflow.

Keep going

💬 Just reach out. If there’s a Carl on your team and you’re not sure where to start, tell us about it.

📅 Book a free 30-minute consult. Think out loud with Julian and Brendon. They’ll help you sanity-check an idea or scope a first project.

🎥 Watch the full webinar. 37 minutes with Mike Stone, plus the full Q&A.

Julian Lancaster

Julian Lancaster is CISO at Prowess Consulting, where he leads efforts to ensure clients can adopt advanced technologies with confidence and resilience. With more than 15 years of experience spanning systems engineering, IT administration, and enterprise security, Julian brings both technical depth and a pragmatic perspective to his work.