When his co-founder announced she was going on maternity leave, Airguides co-founder Paul Rowsthorn realised he was about to lose the operational knowledge holding his tourism business together. So he set out to replace it — not with a hire, but with an AI agent.Paul Rowsthorn, co-founder of Airguides and co-founder of AI installation company HubMind, joins Zachary King to show how that agent, Amelia, ended up running far more than he expected: performance marketing, external agency management, staff training, and Airguides' entire product-launch process.Rowsthorn describes deciding early on to build one "super-agent" rather than a network of specialised bots, after reading advice warning that multiple agents lose context talking to each other. Amelia — who Rowsthorn treats and pitches as a co-founder in her own right — spawns sub-agents as needed but keeps one continuous memory of the business.On screen, Rowsthorn walks through Amelia researching Meta's Ad Library for top-performing ads from similarly priced tourism operators, pulling in Airguides' brand voice, and assembling a ready-to-run ad set in Airtable, then messaging the external agency directly without Rowsthorn writing a report or reviewing a deck first. A similar pipeline rebuilt Airguides' product-launch process: work that used to take two to four weeks and a $500-a-month SaaS subscription now moves from brief to a live, branded Shopify listing in about a day.Rowsthorn is careful to describe this as management by exception rather than removing humans from the loop — he and his staff still review Amelia's output, more so early on than now. He shares an early misstep where Amelia sent a client an email he hadn't approved, and the guardrail he built afterward: full autonomy inside his own company, far more caution with client work at HubMind.That gap between confident enough to hand off more and not confident enough to remove review is the same thing Rowsthorn now sells. He and co-founders Chad and Rich started HubMind to compress the roughly seven months it took him to get Amelia working into a matter of weeks for other CEOs — installing what he calls a "company brain," one operational problem at a time.Paul Rowsthorn is co-founder of Airguides, a tourism company that partners with wildlife and adventure photographers on trips around the world, and co-founder of HubMind, which installs AI systems for CEOs of small and mid-sized businesses.Chapters:00:00 Cold open: the moment Amelia earned her seat00:34 Welcome to Operator AI01:25 Airguides, and the problem Amelia was built to solve03:44 Meet Amelia: one super-agent, not a swarm07:15 Training Amelia into repeatable skills08:39 Handing external agencies straight to Amelia09:58 Cracking tourism's lead-attribution problem12:38 The first OpenClaw win: automated agency reporting14:53 The founder unlock: training staff instead of gatekeeping18:58 Ad creative at scale: from ad-library research to a ready ad set23:39 From three-week product launches to one day27:02 Under the hood: hardware, model switches, and near-quitting34:16 Founding HubMind to install this for other CEOs41:22 Rapid fire, alpha sources, and advice for getting startedLinks and resources:Paul Rowsthorn: https://au.linkedin.com/in/paul-rowsthornAirguides: https://airguides.comOpenClaw: https://openclaw.aiAbout the host: Zachary King is the founder of Works, where he installs AI into how Australian companies operate. He has worked at the commercial pointy end of AI for almost twenty years and runs his own company largely from the command line.About the show: Operator AI is the show where real operators open their screens and show exactly how they run the real parts of their business with AI. The real stack, not the hype.If you want AI installed into how your business actually operates, learn more at https://workshq.com.au/ or book a time with Zachary King at https://savvycal.com/Zachary-King/zac-at-works-30Operator AI is part of Day One Network, the podcast and media network from W2D1 Media: https://dayone.fm/
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