Over the last couple of weeks three different SMB owners asked me the same question.
"Alan, who do I hire to build agents for my business?"
I gave them the same answer every time: there’s no one.
It isn't that no one is trying. It's that the people doing this well are too busy doing it to sell it, and the people selling it loudly almost universally can't ship. The traditional dev shop quotes $250k and twelve weeks for something a kid with a laptop and Claude Code could prototype over a weekend. The fly-by-night "AI agency" that DMs you on LinkedIn quotes $15k and hands you a demo that breaks the moment you point it at real data. Both are wrong, in opposite directions.
I keep getting asked because the need is real. AI agents can do incredible things for your business. On the other hand I can’t find qualified people to build them at a price and with a business model that makes sense.
I run a software business and a consulting firm and I'm an investor in two AI companies. I have built agents that work in production. I know what good looks like. And I cannot, with a straight face, point an owner at a vendor and say go there. Not yet.
So I decided to do something about it from the supply side. This summer I'm teaching a small group of college interns. Not what colleges teach. What colleges either won't teach or actively discourage:
A broad overview of key development concepts: planning, testing, front ends backends, etc.
Training on how to use Claude Code for knowledge work and software development to solve issues with increasing levels of sophistication.
Agentic architecture and validation to help improve AI outcomes.
Change management. How do you get people to use what you’ve built?
An overview of the key tools agentic engineers are using: Claude Code, Codex, Supabase, Vercel, Railway, etc.
Universities are not equipped to teach any of this. Most computer science programs are focused on the lessons you needed 10-15 years ago. Worse, even plenty of CS faculty are openly hostile to AI and forget about the other departments. They are spending time trying to find a good AI writing detector to bust students with rather than training them to work in the real jobs that where they will use AI to write almost everything.
The most important technology for at least a generation comes along and most of the people teaching students want to ignore it. This is a crime. The world they are training students for is dissolving underneath them. Stewart Brand's line keeps coming back to me: "Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road."
What an SMB owner actually needs is someone who can sit in their office, ride along on a sales call, watch the front desk wrestle a spreadsheet, and get them a better solution by Friday. That’s a different profession than software engineering. It’s what happens when code and other knowledge work collapse into each other. It’s what happens when a smart generalist can build software with relative ease. I call it knowledge programming.
The people who fill that gap will not come out of CS programs. They will come from the same place every operator-first profession has always come from: apprenticeship for smart and motivated young people.
That's what I'm building. A small program now. A bigger one if it works. Real owners as the clients. Real businesses as the curriculum. The interns aren't training for an exam. They're training to walk into a 10-100-person company and leave behind something that pays for itself in a quarter.
If you're an SMB owner who has been told to wait for the right vendor two paths actually exist right now. One: get a Claude Cowork subscription, sit with it for 90 days, and stop treating AI as something you outsource. Two: keep an eye on this corner of the internet, because the people I'm training will be available, and they will not look like a dev shop or an agency.
I'll be writing more about this: what I'm specifically teaching, how I'm screening for it, what owners should expect when these folks start showing up in their inboxes. If you want to see the curriculum, or you have an SMB problem you'd like me to use as a teaching case, email me.
There's nobody to call. I'm trying to fix that.
— Alan