Digital + Physical Integration
Agents managing real-world operations
Agents that watch batteries, water tanks, boat schedules and guest messages — and hand the right problem to the right human.
01The situation
Remote sites fail quietly: a battery drifting low overnight, a tank running dry, a boat pickup nobody confirmed, a guest message unanswered at 2 a.m. The information exists — it just never reaches the right human in time.
02What we built
Agents connected to real-world signals: battery state, tank levels, pump status, uplink health, the boat schedule and the guest inbox. Each one has thresholds and a named human to escalate to over WhatsApp.
Agents draft; humans approve anything involving money, bookings or safety.
03What broke
Too many alerts in week one — the caretaker muted everything. We cut alerts by 80% and now only page for things that need a human within the hour.
04What’s next
Extending the pilot to two partner properties and publishing the playbook, including every threshold we’ve had to change.
Stories from this build
All stories
No. 045Infrastructure
What Actually Breaks When You Go Off-Grid
Not the solar panels. A running list of the failures that actually took us offline — and the boring fixes that kept us online after.
9 min read · 13 Sept
No. 044Agents
Deploying AI Agents in a Province with Unstable Internet
Our agents assume the connection will drop. Here’s the architecture that lets them queue, retry, and still hand every message to a human on time.
10 min read · 6 Sept