Field operations
Closing a landed job when the vendor blocks every API
A landed construction job produces a fixed packet of paperwork. An agentic employee assembles that packet end to end by driving the vendor software the same way a person does, through the browser, because the vendor grants no API access at all.
- Who it is for
- Franchise owners and trade contractors locked into corporate software they cannot integrate with. If your CRM is chosen for you and IT will not issue an API key, this is the pattern.
- Deployed for
- CertaPro of Grand Haven and CertaPro of Kalamazoo, operating across their West Michigan territories on a corporate-mandated CRM running on Microsoft Dynamics.
- Status
- Live deployment
The goal
Every landed job produces the same packet: multiple priced proposals, a subcontractor agreement, a financing record, an invoice, a next steps email to the customer, and a review request. The steps are known. They are also tedious, and the tedium is exactly why they get skipped under load.
The goal is not to replace the salesperson. It is to make the packet impossible to forget, and to remove the part of the work that is copying a number from one screen into another.
A second goal, less obvious and more valuable: write the procedure down once, in a document a human can read and correct, so the process survives the person who currently holds it in their head.
Cost, against the human alternative
This is a deployment plus skill development. Prospectr publishes an Agentic Employee Core deployment at $10,000 and Sovereign at $25,000, with custom skill hours at $250 per hour for the first 60 hours on a Sovereign deployment and $300 per hour after. The Sovereign tier includes 60 hours of skill development before launch, which is what a procedure of this depth consumes.
Anchor title: Operations and Business Manager, the person who assembles packets and chases paperwork. Typical fully-loaded cost is $65,000 to $75,000 a year, meaning base pay plus payroll tax, benefits, paid time off, the ramp time before they are productive, and the cost of refilling the seat when they leave. That is a market range for the title, not a quote of anyone actual salary. The goal is not to replace that person. It is to put them in their most productive role. The packet assembly leaves their desk. The collections calls, the vendor negotiation, and the scheduling judgment stay, because those are the parts of the job that pay for the seat.
The build cost is a one-time number. The paperwork is a forever number. That is the whole arithmetic.
Most of the cost in a build like this is not the software. It is the interviews, the rulings, and the twenty-seven revisions of a written procedure until it matches what actually happens on a job.
The goal is not to replace humans. It is to put them in their most productive role. Nobody gets cut here. Your billing manager stops doing data entry and starts working collections. Your GM stops chasing paperwork and starts selling. The agent absorbs the repetitive half of a job so the person keeps the half that actually needs a person.
This is a typical fully-loaded annual range for that title, meaning base pay plus payroll tax, benefits, paid time off, ramp time before the person is productive, and the cost of refilling the seat when they leave. It is a market range for the role, not a quote of anyone actual salary.
Security
- The agent operates a browser session that a human authenticated. It never holds the vendor password and cannot create its own session.
- The agent opens its own browser tabs, records their identifiers, and closes only what it opened. It is forbidden from restarting the browser, because doing so destroys a human-authenticated session that requires multi-factor sign-in to restore.
- Read-heavy by design. Writes are limited to the specific documents the procedure names.
- No credential, token, or account identifier is stored in the written procedure. Credentials live in a secret store and are referenced by location, never by value.
Output
- A complete job packet per landed job, assembled in the vendor systems rather than in a parallel tool the office would have to learn.
- A written procedure document that a non-technical operator can read, disagree with, and correct. Corrections in the document change the agent behavior, not the other way around.
- A changelog showing every ruling the owner made and the date, so a decision made in a hallway conversation stops evaporating.
Ongoing cost to maintain
- Most of this work is deterministic. Prospectr routes deterministic recurring jobs to plain scheduled scripts, which cost nothing per run, and reserves paid model inference for the steps that genuinely need judgment such as drafting the customer email.
- The recurring bill is therefore dominated by hosting and by the small number of reasoning steps, not by the number of jobs processed.
- Vendor interface changes are the real maintenance cost. A UI-driven procedure breaks when the vendor moves a button, and that is a known, budgeted category of work rather than a surprise.
The framework that keeps it safe and keeps it cheap
- One document per procedure, containing the plain-English version for a human, the machine detail for the agent, and a dated changelog. This is the Prospectr Skill Creation Guidebook format and it is what stops institutional knowledge from living in a chat log.
- The document is the source of truth. The copy on the machine is generated from it. An operator who edits the document changes the system, which means the owner is never dependent on an engineer to correct a business rule.
- Every claimed result is verified against the system of record before it is reported. A job that reports success and produced nothing has failed, and the verification step is what catches that.
- You own the deployment. It runs in your cloud account, on your credentials, and the procedure documents are in your Drive. There is no per-seat meter and nothing to be held hostage at renewal.
The procedures behind this
Each of these is a written document with a plain-English section for a person, a machine-readable section for the agent, and a dated changelog.
- certapro-job-jacket
- mac-studio-chrome-cdp-automation
- troy-outlook-dynamics-access
- prospectr-branded-pdf-report
Where every claim on this page comes from
- Procedure exists and is versioned: skills/certapro-job-jacket/SKILL.md, canonical document maintained at version 27 as of 2026-08-14, including named owner rulings with dates.
- Vendor API restriction is documented as a permanent constraint, not a missing credential, in the same skill document under Rule 0.
- Browser session fragility and the no-restart rule are documented from a real 2026-08-14 incident in which a session was destroyed and required human multi-factor recovery.
- Pricing figures are Prospectr published pricing, already live at /pricing (src/data/pricing.ts).
- Cost routing rule for deterministic versus reasoning work is the standing internal CRON versus SYSTEMD rule in AGENTS.md, dated 2026-04-28.
Questions people ask about this
What happens when the software has no API at all?
The agent drives the browser the same way a person does. It uses an existing authenticated session, opens its own tabs, performs the steps in the written procedure, and closes what it opened. This is slower and more fragile than an API, and we say so plainly, but it is the difference between the work being automated and the work not being automated.
Does the agent get its own login to our CRM?
No. It works inside a session a human signed into. It does not hold the password and cannot create a session on its own. That is a deliberate limit, because it means the worst case is a broken automation rather than an unattended account acting on your behalf.
What breaks this, and how often?
Vendor interface changes. When the vendor moves a button, a browser-driven step fails. That is a known category of maintenance and it is budgeted for. It is also why the procedure lives in a document you can read: when a step changes, the change is a paragraph edit, not a development project.
Who owns the procedure once it is written?
You do. It is a document in your Drive, in plain English, with a changelog. If you stop working with us, the procedure and the deployment stay with you.
Is there a version of this in your business?
The discovery call is a working conversation, not a demo. Bring the process that annoys you most.