Most agent demos fail in production for the same reason: they’re given autonomy before they’ve earned trust. This session is a practitioner’s look at how a growth agency serving legal, healthcare and professional-services firms runs AI agents in daily operations, and why “draft and propose, humans approve” beats “fully autonomous.” We’ll walk through the real stack: Hermes-based agents with local and cloud models; a shared company “brain” that gives every agent the same curated context and keeps live systems authoritative; and a coordination board where agents hand off bounded tasks and flag decisions that belong to a person. You’ll see the guardrails that make it safe: approval gates on anything client-facing, per-agent credentials scoped to a human owner, and reviewed pull requests for every change to shared knowledge. Attendees leave with a practical blueprint for deciding what to automate, what to gate, and how to expand agent scope without losing control.