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Hermes Agent For Business: Start With One Job, Then Grow It With Five Copy-Paste Prompts In Your Agent OS

By Julian Goldie · 4 November 2026 · agentos.guide

Hermes Agent for business runs best inside your Agent OS when you hand it one job, let it run unattended for a fortnight, and only then add the next.

Below is a quick start, five prompts to paste into your agent for a salon, an accountant, a shop and an agency, and a weekly routine to keep it all tidy.

Every feature here is taken from the official Hermes Agent docs.

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Which Hermes Feature Handles Which Business Job

Pick one row to begin with, not six.

The scheduled summary is the easiest, because it needs one file, one channel and no new accounts.

The agent inbox comes next, since it needs a fresh mailbox and an app password before anything else.

Quick Start: One Channel, One Job

1. Install Hermes and connect a model: hermes setup --portal handles the model and the built-in tools in one sign-in.
2. Run hermes gateway setup and connect the one chat app you check most.
3. Add your own user ID to that platform's allowlist, for example TELEGRAM_ALLOWED_USERS.
4. Install the gateway as a service with hermes gateway install so scheduled jobs keep firing.
5. Paste Prompt 1 below.

If your Agent OS came from the AI Profit Boardroom, the install and model steps are already done.

Prompt 1: The Salon's Weekly Bookings Summary

A salon exports its booking list as an Excel file each week; this turns it into a short Monday note.

Create a cron job that runs every Monday at 07:30.
It should open bookings.xlsx in /srv/salon/exports,
list each stylist's bookings for the coming week,
and flag any day with no bookings at all.
Deliver it to my Telegram home channel.
If the file is missing, say so in one line.
If there is nothing to flag, reply [SILENT].
Show me the job before you save it.

Hermes reads .xlsx natively, so there's nothing extra to install.

The [SILENT] marker means a quiet week sends nothing, while a failed run still posts a warning.

For pausing, stopping and missed-run rules, our Hermes cron job guide covers the whole scheduler.

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Prompt 2: The Accountant's Agent Inbox

An accounting practice wants the partners to email the agent and get answers in-thread.

Help me set up the Hermes email gateway for a new, dedicated
mailbox that only you will use. Do not ask me to type any
password into this chat. Tell me which lines I add to
~/.hermes/.env myself, including EMAIL_ALLOWED_USERS for the
two partners and EMAIL_AUTHSERV_ID for Gmail. Remind me to
use an app password with two-factor sign-in on, then check
the gateway starts cleanly.

The email page is clear: a dedicated account, never a personal one, because the agent gets full inbox access over IMAP.

Gmail needs 2FA switched on and a 16-character App Password in place of the normal one.

Mail from anyone not on the list is ignored, and the password file should be locked down with chmod 600.

Prompt 3: The Paperwork Pile

For any office that lives in Word, Excel and PDF, this is a safe first document job.

Read every file in /srv/practice/clients/hughes-2026.
For each one, give me the document type and one line on
what it contains. If any PDF comes back with a coverage
warning, list the empty page ranges and ask me before you
render or OCR anything.

The extraction docs say PDFs are read from the text layer, so scanned pages come back empty and trigger a warning with their page ranges.

For a few pages, the agent can render them and use vision; for many, the ocr-and-documents skill is the documented route.

Prompt 4: Save The Job As A Skill

Once a job's output looks right two weeks running, lock the method in.

Save the process you used for the salon summary as a skill
called weekly-bookings-summary. Include the folder, the
columns you read, what counts as a flag, and the pitfalls
you hit. Then attach that skill to the Monday cron job
and shorten the job's prompt to one line.

Skills live as SKILL.md files under ~/.hermes/skills/, and every installed skill doubles as a slash command, according to the skills guide.

Cron jobs can load one or several skills before the prompt runs.

Fix problems in the skill rather than the job's prompt, so every job that uses it gets the fix at once.

If the agent offers to save a method after a long task, say yes; the docs note these agent-written skills capture the pitfalls it found along the way.

Prompt 5: The Agency's Board

A small agency running three client newsletters needs research, drafting and review handed between agents.

Set up a Kanban board for client newsletters. Use the
tenant client-florist for this client. Create a research
card for the researcher profile and a drafting card for
the writer profile that waits until research is done.
Use delegate_task only for quick fact checks inside a card.
Post a summary to Slack when a card moves to review.

The board lives in ~/.hermes/kanban.db, each worker runs as its own process under its own profile, and the dispatcher inside the gateway checks for ready cards every 60 seconds.

The docs draw the line plainly: delegate_task is a function call that returns a summary, while Kanban is a durable queue that humans can comment on and unblock.

Bring The Shop's Team Chat In

Once the first job is steady, a shop can let its staff ask the same agent questions in Slack.

Hermes joins Slack over Socket Mode, so it needs a bot token, an app token and a list of allowed member IDs.

In direct messages it answers everything; in a channel it waits for an @mention, then carries on inside that thread.

Give it this prompt once the tokens are in your .env file:

Check my Slack gateway settings. Confirm SLACK_ALLOWED_USERS
lists only our four staff, set SLACK_HOME_CHANNEL to the channel ID
of #shop-ops for scheduled posts, and add a channel override so #suppliers
gets a short system prompt about supplier questions.
Restart the gateway and tell me what changed.

The Slack page lists each setting, and Telegram, Teams and WhatsApp follow the same allowlist pattern.

Give Each Job A Bot

When two or three jobs are stable, Bot Mode in the Desktop app gives each its own named Bot.

Click New Agent, fill in Name, Title and Description, and pin a model under Advanced if this role needs a different one.

Each Bot is a profile under ~/.hermes/profiles/<name>/, and its Routines are cron jobs labelled [bot:<name>].

Group them into sections, such as Clients and Team, so a busy roster stays easy to scan.

Lock Access And Logins First

The security page says that with no allowlist set, every user is denied.

New staff can DM the bot, receive an 8-character code, and you approve it with hermes pairing approve <platform> <code>.

For supplier portals and booking systems, the credential vault asks for the login in a masked prompt and fills it without the model seeing it; our Hermes vault guide covers the five vault prompts.

Card fills always ask a person, and scheduled jobs can't approve them.

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What Unattended Runs Won't Do

Scheduled jobs, one-shot -q sessions and webhook or API sessions have nobody to answer an approval prompt.

So cron_mode, single_query_mode and unattended_mode all default to deny: a dangerous command is blocked and the agent must find another path.

Under that, the hardline blocklist refuses commands such as a root filesystem wipe in every mode, yolo included.

You can also add your own approvals.deny patterns, which block matching commands before yolo is even considered.

Leave those defaults alone unless a job truly needs otherwise.

The Weekly Routine

• Monday: read each job's output and fix the skill, not the prompt, when something's off.
• Midweek: run hermes pairing list and revoke anyone who's left.
• Friday: check hermes cron list and the board with hermes kanban stats.
• Once a month: add one new job, never three.

Members of the AI Profit Boardroom can bring their routine to the weekly coaching calls for a second opinion.

FAQ

Which prompt should I paste first?

Prompt 1, the scheduled summary. It needs one channel and one file, and it shows you how the agent handles an unattended job.

Should I give the agent my email password in chat?

No. Add the app password to ~/.hermes/.env yourself, and use a dedicated mailbox as the Hermes email docs advise.

When is it time to add the Kanban board?

When work has to pass between several agents or people and survive restarts. For quick side checks inside one job, delegation is enough.

Do Bot Mode routines run differently from cron jobs?

No. Routines are cron jobs labelled with the Bot name, so they appear in hermes cron list and follow the same safety defaults.

Final word on Hermes Agent For Business

Paste Prompt 1 into your agent today, and book a free strategy session if you want help planning what comes next for Hermes Agent for business.

Related guides on agentos.guide

→ Hermes Agent Cron Job: Schedule, Stop And Recover Jobs In Your Agent OS With 5 Copy-Paste Prompts

→ Hermes Vault: Save Logins, Auto-Fill 2FA And Move The Key To Your Keychain In Your Agent OS With Five Copy-Paste Prompts

→ Hermes Delegation: Run Parallel Subagents In Your Agent OS With 5 Copy-Paste Prompts

→ The Best Hermes Agent Plugins: My Top 10, And Where Each One Fits In Your Agent OS

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