IMTS 2026 · Sept 14–19 · McCormick Place · Industrial AI Arena — Booth 237615 → grab an audit slot at the show rate
AI agent workforces · manufacturing back office

Most office jobs are 75% repetition.
We hand that 75% to AI agents.

One person plus four agents does the work of four people — with fewer errors and no one new on payroll. Built in weeks by the operator-CFO who runs the back office of an AS9100 / ITAR precision defense manufacturer, and runs these agents in it every day.

Works with the systems you already have — your email, your spreadsheets, your accounting system, your ERP. Nothing replaced. Your people approve everything.

Watch the crew work — live demo See pricing — it's published
Meet the crew — live now
AI BOT / AGENT · FINANCE · AP
FionaIDLE
does most of the job of your Accounts Payable clerkon duty
AI BOT / AGENT · PURCHASING
MarcusIDLE
does most of the job of your Purchasing agenton duty
AI BOT / AGENT · RECEIVING
PriyaIDLE
does most of the job of your Receiving & inventoryon duty
AI BOT / AGENT · HR
DanaIDLE
does most of the job of your HR & onboardingon duty
AI BOT / AGENT · FINANCE · AR
TheoIDLE
does most of the job of your Bookkeeper (AR)on duty
AI BOT / AGENT · EXPEDITOR
NoraIDLE
does most of the job of your Expeditoron duty

Yes, they have names. Agents with names get treated like coworkers — which is exactly how adoption sticks. Nobody at our shop lost a job to the crew; they stopped drowning.

MISSION CONTROL — what the agents did in the last hourON DUTY
▸ A vendor billed $12.98 for a part they quoted at $12.40.
⚠ Overcharge caught. The agent wrote the "please fix this" email → waiting for a human to hit send
▸ Double-checked 974 invoices against the books.
✓ 973 matched perfectly. 1 set aside for a person to look at.
▸ Read the delivery paperwork and filed the part into inventory. No typing.
▸ All 11 department agents checked in — no problems found.
✓ Left on the human's to-do list: 2 decisions. Everything else — already done.
— nothing gets sent until a person clicks approve —
Proof, not promises — measured this summer

Live numbers from our own back office.

All figures below come off our agent system's ROI meter, running in production at an 80-person AS9100 precision CNC defense manufacturer. Anonymized detail available on request. Results are measured against a baseline your team countersigns — never promised.

0hours of office work returned in 7 weeksroi_meter · since 07-10
0× return on agent run costlabor value ÷ run cost
0tasks handled by the crew this weeklive · updates weekly
0purchasing tasks in one week — for ~$50 of run costpurchasing agent, wk of 8/24
PURCHASING · FINANCE

The Vendor Price Watchdog

Every PO line checked against quoted and historical pricing. Drift flagged, recovery drafted, a human approves.

Six figures/yrin savings and recovered overcharges · ~76 purchasing items weekly
DATA ENTRY · UNIVERSAL

A Hundred Hours, Returned

Documents read once, entered everywhere — invoices, receiving with custom cataloging, scanned records. Daily reconciliation across ~950 invoices.

99.9% matchand 100+ hrs/week of manual entry eliminated — capacity gained, nobody replaced
OPERATIONS-WIDE

The Self-Running Cadence

Department agents run status checks, reconciliations, and document processing — queuing only real decisions to the owner.

144 items/wkhandled with minutes per day of human approval time
Engagements · fixed scope · published pricing

Nobody else in this market shows you a price. Here's ours.

Three paid rungs — each ships working software, and each credits toward the next. Two free ways to start below. Complex volumes get scoped honestly on the kickoff call — but the numbers below are real.

Back-Office Automation Audit
2 weeks · remote · ~3 hrs of your time
$2,500$1,950
IMTS show rate · 10 slots · 100% credits toward your build
  • Your top pain areas mapped & dollarized
  • Every automation ranked by payroll dollars saved
  • ROI model on your volumes
  • Quick-win automation demonstrated live
  • 90-day roadmap you keep either way
Grab an audit slot
First System Shipped
30 days · one named workflow, end to end
from $9,500
fixed scope, fixed price · audit fee credited
  • Production-grade — exceptions route to your people
  • Signed baseline → measured results
  • Working demo every Friday
  • Mission Control dashboard
  • SOP, training video, 30-day hypercare
Book a consultation
AI Operations Partner
Monthly · your automation roadmap, owned
from $3,500/mo
one new improvement shipped every month
  • Monitoring & incident response
  • Monthly value report vs. baseline
  • Defined build-hours allowance
  • Agents kept current as your shop changes
  • Your automation roadmap — owned, ranked, and shipped
Ask about capacity
Free: 5-Minute Shop Automation Scorecard — ten questions, instant 0–100 score, your top 3 automations emailed to you. Take it now →
Free: Machine Shop Automation Playbook — the ten automations every shop under 100 people should be running, with real tool names and honest effort estimates. Email-gated download.
No IT department required

We build on your existing accounts and systems. If you have email and a spreadsheet, you have enough.

Your people approve everything

95% AI, 5% human. Agents draft; humans approve. Nothing sends, posts, or pays without a person saying so.

Start with one agent

Prove it on one workflow, expand when it pays for itself. Every rung credits toward the next.

How it works

The anti-slideware operating model.

STEP 01

Baseline first

Before we build, we measure the current state — hours, volumes, error rates — and your team countersigns it. Every result is measured against it.

STEP 02

Demo every Friday

Working software every week, not status decks. First agent live inside 30 days. If you can't watch it run, it doesn't count.

STEP 03

Handover, keys included

Agents run on your identities, your domains, your systems. SOPs and training included. You are never dependent on infrastructure we control.

Security & data governance

Defense-grade habits, in writing.

Our controls come from daily work inside a regulated defense-manufacturing environment — ITAR and CMMC frameworks, AS9100 discipline — and they're written into every statement of work.

✓
Recipient whitelists

Agents refuse to send to any address the owner hasn't explicitly approved. You'll see this working in the demo — it's a feature, not a limitation.

✓
Draft-first, human-approved

Every outbound action is a draft until a person approves it. Full audit trail on everything the system does — audit-ready as a byproduct.

✓
You own the accounts

Agents run on your identities, your domains, your systems — from day one. Walk away anytime; everything keeps working.

✓
We say no when we should

Year-one policy: no PHI, no export-controlled data, no cardholder data, no automated hiring decisions. If your data needs a certification we don't hold, we'll tell you — which is exactly what you want from a vendor.

60-second scorecard

What is your office overpaying for?

Rough numbers are fine. This is the same math we use in a full audit — just smaller.

IMTS 2026 · SEPT 14–19 · McCORMICK PLACE · INDUSTRIAL AI ARENA · BOOTH 237615

Come watch the crew run a real back office.

Take the 5-minute Shop Automation Scorecard at the table, see Mission Control live, and book a Back-Office Automation Audit at the show rate — $1,950 instead of $2,500, 100% credited toward your build.

10 audit slots at the show rate · first come, first scheduled
Reserve a slot before the show
Skip the line at the booth

Reserve 15 minutes with Sarah.

Three quick picks and you're done — Sarah confirms your time by email. Walk-ups always welcome; booking just guarantees your slot. All times Chicago (show) time.

1 · WHICH DAY WILL YOU BE AT THE SHOW?
The operator behind it

Built by someone who has actually closed a month-end.

I spent twenty years in clinical healthcare operations, then moved into manufacturing — where I now run operations and finance for an 80-person AS9100 precision CNC defense contractor. Seven departments, ITAR and CMMC compliance, and every back-office headache a company can have.

I got tired of watching skilled people spend their days keying invoices, chasing vendor quotes, and retyping data between systems. So I automated it. More than a hundred hours a week returned to my team. Six figures a year in savings and recovered costs.

These days that makes me the company's de facto chief AI officer — but the title that matters is operator: I own the month-end, the audits, and the processes the automation touches. That's the difference between automation designed from a slide and automation designed from the inside.

My philosophy is 95% AI, 5% human: the systems do the work, people approve the exceptions, and nobody is surprised by anything the automation does. Now I build the same thing for other companies. Not a strategy deck. The working system.

— Sarah · Founder & Principal, Shipped Systems

The audit ships software. The build ships a system.
Nothing we do ships a deck.

They sell you software. We build yours — and hand you the keys.

Start with a call →
Start here

Tell us where it hurts.

Two-minute intake. You'll get a reply from Sarah — a real observation about your business, not a canned pitch. We reply within one business day.

Or write us directly: contact@shippedsystems.com