The User and the Machine: AI Agents for Your Daily Work: From Asking to Delegating (The Professional and the Machine)

Asking is not delegating.Millions of professionals use AI to ask questions. What they don't know is that they can have an agent that works for them: one that processes their files, drafts their reports, organizes their email, prepares their presentations, and manages their servers.This book teaches any professional — administrative staff, managers, analysts, finance teams, system administrators — to use AI agents to transform their daily work. No coding. No unnecessary jargon. With results from the very first chapter.What will you learn?Organize 500 files in 10 minutes — the agent classifies, renames, and structures your foldersExtract data from 50 PDF invoices — dates, amounts, and vendors dumped into a tableGenerate professional reports from raw data — from a CSV to an executive report with chartsProcess 40 pending emails with draft replies — your inbox under controlPrepare meeting minutes in minutes — decisions, assigned actions, and follow-up emailReconcile expenses, prepare budgets, and generate financial reportingDiagnose servers, manage cloud, and orchestrate containers from the terminalAutomate recurring tasks — the Monday report generates itself at 9:00 AMOrchestrate teams of agents working in parallel on complex tasks28 practical chapters across 9 partsEach chapter starts with a real office problem and ends with the reader having solved it. The structure is always the same: the problem, the agent-based solution, and a step-by-step guide you can reproduce on your own computer.Part I — What is an agent and why it's different from a chatbot · Part II — Files, PDFs, reports, and presentations · Part III — Connecting the agent to your real tools (MCP) · Part IV — Email, calendar, meetings, and project management · Part V — Data, finance, databases, and visualization · Part VI — Terminal, servers, cloud, and containers · Part VII — Automation, pipelines, and agent teams · Part VIII — What NOT to delegate and how to protect your data · Part IX — Building your personal productivity systemWritten from experience, not from theoryThe author manages five software projects in parallel, publishes books, administers servers, and processes documents — all with AI agents. Every example in the book comes from a real workflow. Limitations are stated with the same honesty as the benefits.Book #6 in "The Professional and the Machine" series, which also includes The Architect and the Machine, The Pentester and the Machine, The CISO and the Machine, The Cyber Range and the Machine, and PQC-Day and the Machine.About the authors: Carlos Pérez González, AI solutions architect with over two decades in offensive cybersecurity (OSCE, OSCP, OSWE, OSEP). Founder of ihacklabs, acquired by Telefónica in 2020. Juan Carlos Montes Senra, cybersecurity architect with a forensic and offensive profile (GCFA, GREM), published in PHRACK #65. Read more