Choosing an agent for a small business
Facts as of 20 Oct 2026. Facts link to the claim log. Advice is our opinion.
1. Start from where your team already talks
If your team lives in Slack or Teams, shortlist agents that work there: Dots (ChatGPT, Slack, Teams), Microsoft Autopilot (Teams, Outlook — private preview) and Grok Bot (desktop + iOS, team plans). Agents that only live in a consumer messaging app are harder to govern.
2. Price per seat, not per person
Seats that include agents (as of 20 Oct 2026): ChatGPT Business Premium $125/seat/mo (reported), X Subscription team seats from $30, Claude Team plans, and Microsoft’s usage-based Copilot Credits. Allowances for agent work are mostly unpublished, so run a two-week pilot and read the usage screen.
3. One agent per job
Give each agent one lane (support queue, outbound, reporting). Grok Bot is built for this: parallel Bots with a chief of staff on top. Note that its Bots share one computer per account, so treat any login on it as shared.
4. Paper trail
Prefer agents with audit logs and admin controls (Autopilot, enterprise Grok Bot). Write an approvals policy before go-live: what the agent may send, buy or delete without asking.
5. Pilot checklist
Two weeks, one workflow, read-only connectors first, a weekly review of the activity log, and an exit plan (how to revoke access and export work).
Tools for this
Agent Picker · Trust-zone checklist · Free evaluation scorecard (CSV) · Full kit