Building an AI lead-qualification agent in a week

A real walkthrough of building, deploying, and running a lead-qualification agent inside a week. Stack, prompts, integration, guardrails, monitoring.

The lead-qualification agent is the single best 'first AI workflow' for almost any service business. The ROI is immediate, the build is small enough to ship in a week, and the team gets to see AI do something obviously valuable before any deeper investment.

This is the build, in the actual order it happens, including the parts that go sideways and how to recover. No theory. No deck.

Inbound lead form submits → agent picks it up → enriches with public-source data → scores it 1–10 against a defined ICP → writes a structured note into the CRM → routes high-scores to the senior closer's calendar and low-scores to a nurture sequence.