I Let an AI Agent Find Leads and Send My Cold Emails: Setup, Fixes, What Broke

TL;DR: I connected Grok Bot (a desktop AI agent) to Gmail and asked for a daily cold email campaign of 10 emails. It wanted a paid lead tool, so I pointed it at a free Google Maps method I'd built before. The first emails came out messy, then over-designed, and only the third try was a plain email I'd send. The automation ended up running, but I have no opens, replies or meetings from this run. It's a setup log, not a results case study.

Cold email is one of the most practical jobs an AI agent could take off my plate: find businesses, write to them, send every day. I wanted to see how far plain-language instructions get me, including the parts that usually need paid tools.

Connecting Gmail was quick: plugins, Gmail, add account, authorize, pick the account in the browser, allow access. One nice detail: once an account is connected in plugins, every bot I run can use it, so I don't reconnect per bot.

Before cold email I tested simple inbox work.

Any chat AI can do the first two. The routine is what matters: a saved instruction that runs on a schedule by itself.

Set me up a cold email campaign to run daily, 10 cold emails. It's the AI automation niche, and I want to offer something similar to what's on my website. Before you send anything, write me an example here. Target people in the United States: managers, social media, at not very big companies. Your task is to find those leads yourself. How are you going to do it?

It read my site and came back with a very simple example email based on it. Then it explained its plan: search the internet for 10 real businesses every day.

Its plan for finding leads was to add an Apollo connector. Reasonable idea, but Apollo costs money, so I said no.

Instead I gave it the folder location of the lead finder from my earlier video and told it: open this folder, learn this method, use the same Google Maps API, this is the free method. I also asked it to add a second routine to find emails and send cold emails daily, every day, not only weekdays, and to switch the inbox routine to every day too.

First hiccup: it couldn't find the folder. That was on me. I had copied it over from another computer. Because the agent has local access to this machine, it went and found it on its own. After reading the project it understood it should use Google Places for the leads.

"Find me 10 actual leads and send them out right now."

I screenshotted the bad email, gave it back, and said: send yourself a test email and keep fixing it until it looks good. You have my email access, so read it yourself.

It fixed it, but in the wrong direction. It made a "beautiful" email with buttons, like a newsletter. Not what I meant. So I spelled it out: a simple email, no buttons, nothing fancy, just a regular email.

The next test came back as a plain, normal-looking email. That's the one that stuck. When I asked how it would all run and whether it was sending now, it said everything was set up.

The funny part: I'd set up this exact same kind of program before with another email account, and that time it did everything on the first try. This time it got stuck, threw errors and had its own ideas about what a cold email should look like.

Always follow the email marketing, privacy and anti-spam rules where you and your recipients are. Written up from my video with AI help; the test and the opinions are mine.

Full run on video (my channel): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oy8g3_k2Ios