Why I built an AI agent out of a business book
How a Key Person of Influence framework became a live tool, and what that taught me about turning ideas into systems people can actually use.
I read a lot of business books. Most of them leave you with a good model and no way to use it. You finish the last page, nod, and carry on exactly as before. The thinking was sound. The gap was that nothing in my week changed because of it.
So I tried something different with one of them. Daniel Priestley's Key Person of Influence framework gives you five clear elements to work on. That structure is the interesting part: anything with clear inputs and a clear scoring model is a candidate to become a tool rather than a chapter. I built it into a live agent you can use at kpi.leegrieve.com.
The point was not the book
The point was the move. Take a proven way of thinking and turn it into something that does the work with you, end to end. That is the same move I make at work with AI agents and automation, just pointed at a different problem.
Here is what building it reminded me of.
Ideas are cheap, systems compound
A framework you have read is worth very little until it is doing something. The moment it becomes a tool, it starts to pay back every time someone uses it. That is the whole case for building rather than advising.
Scope is the hard part, not the model
The model was already good. The work was deciding what to leave out, how to ask the questions, and where a human still needs to make the call. Most of building with AI is this kind of judgement, not prompting.
Shipping changes the conversation
A working tool says more than a deck ever could. It is proof, not a promise.
If you want to see the result, try the agent. And if you are trying to turn your own repeatable thinking into a system, that is exactly the kind of work I like to do.