Zero.co

Inspiration

Sales and support teams spend up to 70% of their day on administrative work: logging data, research, and writing drafts. We built Zero.co to turn the CRM from a passive database into an active, self-operating system. Instead of tools you have to click, we envisioned a digital workforce of autonomous AI agents that run your operations natively and securely.

What it does

Zero.co is an autonomous, agent-led CRM and Software Factory. It watches incoming customer queries, uses Bedrock to evaluate intent and risk, and drafts context-aware replies. When safe, the system automatically sends outbound replies via AWS SES. It also executes bulk CRM Autopilots: scoring leads, auto-generating personalized email campaigns, deduplicating data, and creating follow-up task schedules for human staff.

How we built it

The application is built on Next.js, powered by a robust AWS RDS Postgres database configured via Drizzle ORM. The AI reasoning engine utilizes Amazon Bedrock (Nova Micro) to evaluate safety guardrails and policy constraints. Background workers run via Vercel Cron jobs to poll tasks every minute, ensuring the CRM stays active 24/7 without manual triggers.

Challenges we ran into

We faced a major challenge transitioning the initial MVP codebase from an in-memory database to a production-ready AWS RDS instance. Structuring the safety guardrails so that the AI could autonomously resolve simple queries but safely escalate complex pricing/governance decisions to a pending_approval queue required careful prompt engineering and tight schemas.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We successfully transformed a prototype with manual trigger buttons into a fully autonomous, unattended cron worker. We are proud of building a unified Command Center dashboard that provides live visibility into autonomous actions, emails dispatched, and agent memories stored in real time.

What we learned

We learned the importance of structuring AI workflows around strict policy guardrails. Unattended execution is powerful, but it requires design patterns that gracefully handle failure, log steps to an audit ledger, and present high-risk exceptions to human administrators.

What's next for Zero.co

We plan to hook up real-time Google Workspace and Microsoft 365 integrations, allowing the agents to read and write emails directly from Gmail and Outlook. We will also integrate third-party enrichment APIs like Apollo and Clearbit to automatically research leads before drafting outreach.