- “We fired the support employee back in April. It doesn't reply by itself — I say go, and it sends automatically and closes the ticket.” — Natalia
The problem
Natalia was paying a human support employee to answer Help Scout tickets, and Help Scout's built-in AI replies add-on was too expensive (~$45-49 per agent per month). She also didn't want any AI sending customer emails without her approval.
The AI solution
In January/February she bought a Mac Mini and set up an agent — named Tina — using OpenClaw. Tina runs on Natalia's existing ChatGPT subscription (no extra AI cost), has her own personality, her own computer, and her own email address, and is connected only to specific parts of the business, including Help Scout, where she has the whole business documentation in memory. When a support email comes in, Tina checks that memory and drafts the answer.
Natalia manages everything through Telegram: Tina sends her an update every hour, she reviews any new tickets and the proposed replies right in the chat, and if a reply is correct she just says "go" — Tina then sends it automatically and closes the ticket in Help Scout. Nothing goes out without human sign-off. The agent also learns: when Natalia dislikes a draft, she writes how she would have said it and tells Tina to rewrite the email and save it in memory, so the next similar email comes out better — Tina will even remind her, "we had an email a month ago about this topic and you said we do it like this."
Remaining gaps: Tina has no access to the Teachable account, so cancellations and payment issues are handled manually by an assistant, and one person still checks Help Scout manually once a day as a safety net. Natalia has since built a second finance agent on the same Mac Mini.
Tools & costs
Results
Fired the support employee in April after a few months of testing — "it works really well." Ongoing AI cost is zero beyond the existing ChatGPT subscription, versus ~$45-49/agent/month for Help Scout's AI add-on. Draft quality improves over time via saved corrections.
How to copy it
- Set up a dedicated always-on machine (Mac Mini) with OpenClaw running on an AI subscription you already pay for, with its own email address and identity.
- Connect it to your support tool and load it with your business documentation as memory.
- Route everything through Telegram: hourly status updates, drafted replies shown for review, and a "go" command that sends the reply and closes the ticket.
- Keep a human-approval gate — never let it send unsupervised — plus a once-daily manual check of the queue.
- Train it continuously: when a draft is wrong, dictate your version and tell it to rewrite and save the correction to memory.
Source
AI Hangout — July 2026 (recording) · watch this segment on YouTube (29:49) →