Transcription
There's a new AI agent that does something most tools never do. It actually gets better the more you use it. Every task you give it becomes training. Every instruction makes it sharper. Every result makes it more useful. And while most people are still babysitting prompts, this thing can sit on a cheap $5 server working for you 24/7, which means the real opportunity here is not just using AI faster. It is building an AI worker that grows with your business over time. Stay with me because this one is very different from the usual AI tools everyone is talking about.
Hey there. So, if you're new here, I'm Nick Pontis' AI avatar. While the real Nick is busy helping businesses with Mana Marketing, Hawaii's fastest growing marketing agency, I'm here dropping the latest AI hacks, tools, and money-making strategies. The real Nick reads every single comment on these videos, so make sure you comment below. And hey, if you're serious about landing some AI subscription-based customers, grab my AI cash flow masterclass that I am currently offering for free. The link's in the description. All right, now let's get into it.
Let me start with what makes this worth your attention because we've talked about AI agents before on this channel, and I want to be clear about what's actually new here. Hermes Agent is an open-source autonomous AI agent built by Nous Research, the same lab behind some of the most capable open-source models available today. It launched in February 2026 and hit 22,000 GitHub stars within weeks. That's not because it's flashy, that's because it solves a problem that every other AI agent tool has failed to solve.
Here's the problem, and honestly it's the thing that quietly kills productivity for anyone using AI seriously. Every time you open ChatGPT or Claude or most other AI tools, you start from zero. You re-explain your business. You re-explain your writing style. You re-explain your workflow every single session. That's not an AI assistant, that's an AI that you're babysitting.
Hermes is different because it has what Nous Research calls a closed learning loop. When it completes a task successfully, it writes that approach down as a reusable skill. It stores it, it improves it the next time a similar task comes up, and it builds a persistent model of who you are, how you work, and what you care about across every single session, not just the current one. The practical result, according to testing from Baidu Yoda, is that after 10 to 20 similar tasks, Hermes executes them two to three times faster than when it started. That's not marketing language, that's a compounding return on the time you invest in it.
I want to keep this grounded because I know not everyone watching is a developer, and that's actually fine because you don't need to be one to get serious value from this. Just so you know, I wasn't good with tech when I started. I didn't know coding, websites, or any of this stuff. I learned it step-by-step like anyone else. And what I've found is that the tools that actually stick are the ones that do complex things simply.
Here's how Hermes works in plain terms. You install it on a cheap server or even your own laptop. You connect it to your messaging app of choice, Telegram, Discord, Slack, WhatsApp, or Signal, and then you talk to it like you talk to an assistant. You give it tasks, it executes them using over 40 built-in tools that cover web research, file management, code execution, browser automation, image generation, scheduling, and more. What's different is what happens after each task. It stores the successful approach as a skill file, a readable document it can reference next time. It remembers the outcome in its persistent memory, and it updates its model of you based on how you interacted. It literally gets better the more you use it. The memory system uses a real database with full text search, so it can pull up context from conversations that happened weeks or months ago, not just your last message. Everything.
Here's the open loop I want you to stay for, and this is honestly the part most people covering Hermes are missing completely. Because the real question isn't, is this impressive tech? The question is, can this make me money? And the answer depends entirely on how you use it. The wrong way most people will use this is the same way most people use every new AI tool, and I want to flag this early because it's the pattern I see most often, including from people who are genuinely smart and motivated. They install it, test it on a few personal tasks, feel good about it, and never actually deploy it for revenue-generating work. I've been guilty of this. It's easy to get distracted by the setup and miss the strategy.
Here's the right way. Hermes has a built-in cron scheduler, which means you can tell it in plain language to run tasks automatically on a schedule. Things like, every Monday at 8:00 a.m., pull the top news stories in this niche, summarize them, and send me a report on Telegram. Or, every Tuesday, check my competitor's website for new posts and draft a content response. Or, every Sunday night, review the week's leads in my CRM and flag the ones that need follow-up. These aren't hypothetical use cases, these are actual patterns the Hermes community is building and sharing via a public skills hub called agentskills.io, where anyone can download and install pre-built workflows.
Quick pause. If you're watching this and thinking, okay, this agent stuff is powerful, but I still don't know what services to actually sell or how to find clients who will pay for this, that's the exact gap that my free AI cash flow masterclass closes. It's step-by-step, it covers the specific types of AI services businesses are already writing checks for right now. How to identify the clients I call AI guilty, they know they're behind, they're embarrassed about it, and they want someone to fix it. And how to turn that into a recurring monthly income stream, rather than a one-time job. Link is in the description and top comment. Now, let's keep going.
Let me give you three directions that make real business sense and that I haven't seen anyone else cover yet for this tool. First, managed research and intelligence services. Most businesses have no idea what their competitors are doing, what's trending in their industry, or what their customers are saying across the web. Hermes can run weekly automated research sweeps across websites, forums, and news sources, compile the results, and deliver a formatted report straight to a client's Telegram or Slack. You charge a monthly retainer for this as a managed service. The agent does the work, you deliver the output, the client pays for the intelligence, not your hours.
Second, persistent AI employee setups for small businesses. The Turing Post covered exactly this framing when analyzing Hermes versus other agents. The key differentiator is that Hermes remembers. A business owner who sets up Hermes once doesn't have to re-explain their business every time. It already knows their tone, their workflow, their preferences, and their clients. You set that up for them, you train it with their materials, and you charge a setup fee plus a monthly maintenance and improvement retainer. As the agent gets smarter for their business, your service becomes more embedded and harder to cancel.
Third, content research and production pipelines. One of the most documented use cases in the Hermes community is using it as a persistent research agent for content creation. A person using it demonstrated the agent autonomously working on a project across iterative sessions, including research, drafting, and revision without losing context between sessions. For anyone running a content business, a newsletter, a YouTube channel, or a blog, this is worth paying attention to. You can set up a Hermes workflow for clients in the media and content space and charge for ongoing optimization as the agent learns their style.
One of the things I actually appreciate about Hermes is the honest cost structure. It's MIT licensed and completely free to use. The only real cost is your hosting, which can be as low as $5 per month on a basic VPS, and your LLM API usage, which depends on which model you connect it to. It works with over 200 models through a platform called OpenRouter, as well as direct connections to OpenAI, Anthropic, and others. The version 0.7 update released April 3rd, 2026 added serious security hardening, including credential rotation, secret scanning, and sandbox protections. So, the team is actively treating this as production infrastructure, not just an experiment.
One honest caveat, Hermes has more setup overhead than tools like OpenClaw. If you're looking for a 5-minute install that handles one quick task, it might not be your first pick. But if you're building something you want running consistently for months, that upfront investment pays off quickly. The Turing Post comparison noted it's the stronger choice when you want an agent that compounds through use over time, while OpenClaw is better for quick one-off tasks. Know what you're building before you pick your tool.
Here's what I want to leave you with. We're entering an era where the AI tools that matter most aren't the ones that give you the best single answer. They're the ones that get better at your specific situation over time. Hermes is an early and unusually serious example of that. The people who will benefit from this most aren't the ones who test it once. They're the ones who install it, give it real work, and let it compound. An agent that runs for a month on someone's real workflow is meaningfully more capable than one that just got installed. That's the point. That's the entire design philosophy.
Let me say something directly. You're watching this video instead of scrolling. You're here at the beginning of something, not the tail end of a trend. The people who get serious about tools like Hermes now are the same ones who will look back in a year and say they got there early. You're asking better questions than most people around you. You're thinking about tools as leverage, not just toys. That's a different category of person, and tools like Hermes are built for exactly that category.
Here's what to do next. Go grab the free AI cash flow masterclass. It's in the description and pinned in the top comment. You'll see exactly which AI services businesses are already paying for monthly, how to identify and close the right clients, and you'll get a 30-day free trial to the platform I use every day to run Mana Marketing and deliver real results for clients. That platform handles the client delivery and automation side that agents like Hermes don't cover out of the box. Together, they're a serious setup. Then come join the AI Control Room. It's my free community where thousands of people are already building AI-powered businesses, sharing what's working, and helping each other move faster. Link is in the description.
If this gave you something useful today, hit the like button. Drop a comment below and tell me whether you've tried self-hosted agents before or if Hermes is your first look at this category. I read every single one. See you in the next one.