Your first AI employee in ten minutes, starting from your website

The quickest way to a working AI employee is to paste your company's website into the box you see the first time you open xMap Flows. It reads the site, works out what you sell and where, proposes up to three AI employees, and tries each one on live data in front of you. You pick one, press Hire, then Start work now. Ten minutes is a comfortable budget, and most of it is you reading what it found.

This walk through is for an owner or manager who has just signed in and wants something useful running before the next meeting. It covers the three ways in, what each screen asks, a made-up first session from start to finish, and the few choices that decide whether the employee is still useful a month from now.

Three ways in, one result

Every route ends in the same place: an AI employee on the Flows page, with a role, a patch and a timetable.

The website box sits in the welcome window and on the Flows page while your organization has no flows yet. The five questions open from the link under it, Answer 5 quick questions, and can be typed or spoken. Templates are behind More ways, then Hire a ready AI employee.

The ten minutes, step by step

1. Minute one: paste the website and press the button. The page is read once; nothing is saved yet.
2. Minutes two and three: read the proposals. Each card names a role (a Sales scout, an Opening watcher, a Market scout, a Hiring scout or a Road watcher), what it would watch, and up to five first results it found just now on live data.
3. Minute four: judge the results, not the description. Are these the kind of businesses you would really call or watch? If none of the three fits, skip and try the questions instead.
4. Minute five: press Hire on the one that fits. It is saved as a draft flow with your city, the kind of place and a timetable already set.
5. Minutes six and seven: press Start work now. It takes a first full look straight away and then goes live on its timetable, and tells you what that first look found.
6. Minutes eight to ten: open the results, then open the flow once to see its blocks. You do not need to change anything, but knowing where the city and the schedule live saves time later.

A worked example (made up)

Say Tamsin runs a small company in Auckland that supplies grooming tools and shampoo to pet salons. She pastes her website. xMap reads that the company sells to pet groomers and veterinary clinics in Auckland and proposes three employees: a Sales scout ranking pet groomers around the city as prospects, an Opening watcher for groomers that opened in the last twelve months, and a Market scout giving a weekly view of the trade across the city.

The Sales scout's five first results include two mobile groomers she already supplies and three salons she has never heard of. The Opening watcher shows two new salons on the North Shore. She decides the openings matter most, because a new salon is choosing its suppliers right now, and hires the Opening watcher. Start work now runs its first look, finds a handful more, and from tomorrow it emails her each morning, sending each new salon once and never again.

Later that week she uses the five questions on a colleague's account to set up a second employee for veterinary clinics, choosing only in the app so it does not email anyone.

What your new employee is made of

Open the flow and you will see a short chain of blocks. For an Opening watcher it usually reads like this:

• Schedule: every morning, in your own time zone.
• Area of interest: the city the site or your answers named.
• Nearby places: the kind of place, kept to those opened in the last 12 months.
• Only new: drops anything it has shown you before.
• Email: one email a run, the list and a map link.

A Sales scout adds an xMap LLM block that scores each place against what your website says you sell, so the strongest fits come first. You can read the whole chain as one sentence above the canvas, and click any part of that sentence to change it.

Mistakes people make in the first ten minutes

• Hiring all three at once before reading any results. Three employees emailing you every morning is a lot of mail for a first week. Start with one; add the next when the first has earned its place.
• Trusting the role name over the results. A Sales scout that finds the wrong kind of business will keep finding it. If the five results look wrong, change the kind of place before you hire, or use the five questions.
• Leaving the city too wide. If you serve two neighbourhoods, say so in the questions or change the Area of interest. A whole metropolitan area gives a long list you will stop reading.
• Never opening the flow. You do not have to edit it, but one look tells you where to change the timetable and the email address later.
• Forgetting who else should see it. The email goes to you. If a colleague should get it, add their address to the Email block, or let them read the employee's thread in the Team inbox.

What lands in the inbox the next morning

From the first scheduled run, the employee has a thread in the Team inbox. Each morning after it runs it writes a short note: what it did, what it found, the best few, and anything that needs you. If a run fails it writes at once instead of waiting. You can answer it in plain words in that thread: ask why a place was included, pause it until next week, or ask it to look in a second city.