The true story behind our AI Agents (and how we built them by accident)

A glass of red wine in Sofia, an offhand introduction, and a YouTube video changed how I saw what we’d been building for years.

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This week I reflected on how Capto got here, and one moment kept coming back — a turning point I didn’t recognize at the time.

Sofia, Bulgaria. 🇧🇬🇫🇷 A big event hosted by CCI France Bulgarie. Adrien Bacchi — as he often does — was helping me meet more people in the city. (I’ve been lucky. Many people have done that for me. Cheers to all of you.)

Then he turned to a stranger and said:

“Hey, meet Alexis, he built AI Agents before it was trendy.”

For context: this was about 18 months ago. Long before today’s buzz existed.

My honest first thought? Adrien’s blue beard must have gone to his brain. We don’t do those things. We make advanced automation, sure. We play with AI. But we’re not building those fancy things people say will revolutionize the world.

Because that’s exactly what we were doing — playing. 🪀🧸

Few clients wanted the most advanced things we could build. They wanted simple automation. So we kept experimenting with the team, pushing the limits, asking ourselves the same question over and over: how far can we push this?

Come the weekend, I figured: fine. Let’s see what these AI Agents actually are, and where we stand.

I watched a YouTube video. 📺 “How to Build an AI Agent with Python.”

And that’s when it hit me.

We were already doing exactly this. Not only doing it — our process expertise and automation skills were making our Agents more advanced than anything the tutorials covered.

Two feelings hit at once.

First, disappointment. 🙊 The gap between the hype and the reality is enormous. Building an AI Agent that genuinely transforms a finance team takes serious work — not a weekend.

Second, a massive confidence boost. 🦾 We were already mastering something the world was only starting to talk about.

Since then, Capto has been clear: AI Agents & Automation, built for finance teams.

Sometimes the craziest stories really do happen in real life.

So thank you, Adrien. You made me realize what we’d already built.

Now let’s see if we can turn this technical lead into a commercial one.

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Originally posted on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:7458395344444411904/