Marina Ritchie AI Strategy and Adoption

Case study

Eight AI agents run the back office of Adelaide Hills Pantry.

An events platform and multi-agent publishing system for a digital media business in the Adelaide Hills. Live at adelaidehillspantry.com.au.

The outcome

The founder is freed to focus on relationships and growth. Delivery is consistently high quality. Everything is on track and feels under control. The agents do the work; the owner and her virtual assistant keep control through review and a publishing lock.

The build behind that: 244+ events live on the website, 40 pull requests merged in one week, around 16,800 lines added, and a full site uplift in 48 hours.

The problem

The starting point was an attempt to run the business on agentic workflows, but they were not working. The agents were messy and unreliable, they broke down constantly, and they created more chaos than help. There was no clear structure for people or agents to follow, so nothing held together as a system.

What changed

Before

Multiple agents with a messy structure, running wild and breaking things. No clear system or workflow for people and agents to follow.

Now

Notion is the single connecting point for people and agents. Every workflow is fixed, documented and in one place, so both can refer to it.

Before

The scraping agent had no clear steps and tried to do everything in one run. It broke constantly, missed information and had no field criteria.

Now

A five-stage scraping agent with a validation loop, and clear criteria for every field shown on the site. Reliable execution, and 244+ events now listed.

Before

The events listing sat in a Shopify HTML block capped at 250KB, so it could not hold more than about 100 events. Images lived in Google Drive and were slow to load.

Now

Rebuilt on Shopify metaobjects, with every image on the client's own CDN. Fast and reliable, and no longer dependent on anyone else's site.

Before

No newsletter page and nowhere for a new subscriber to land. An off-brand shop with an unclear pre-order state, and guides that were raw newsletter dumps.

Now

In 48 hours, a consistent theme across every page, plus new pages that did not exist before, turning the website into the hub and a key source of information.

How it works

Orchestrated with Claude Code, connecting to each platform through its own tools and APIs. Every tool keeps the job it is already good at.

The agents

Five agents. Each has one job, its own success criteria and its own place in the sequence, and each one waits for a person to approve the result before anything goes out.

Events scraping agent

Keeps the events catalogue accurate, current and worth reading. Five stages and a validation loop, each stage with its own criteria, in place of one run that tried to do everything at once.

  1. Fetch the source and pull the raw event.
  2. Extract every field the site displays, to a defined standard.
  3. Enrich with venue and contact details.
  4. Source and attach the event image.
  5. Curate, deduplicate and check relevance before publishing.

Guardrail. A validation loop returns anything failing its checks to the stage that produced it, and every publish ends with a conformance report, read before the event goes live.

Sponsorship proposal agent

Writes proposals that match what the client actually asked for. It reads the meeting notes and the goals they stated, then makes the case for alignment instead of a generic pitch.

  1. Read the meeting notes and the client record.
  2. Set out the client's goals in their own terms.
  3. Draft the proposal on brand, ready for review.

Guardrail. Every claim in a proposal traces back to the notes or the record.

Client and CRM management agent

Runs the client relationships day to day. It keeps the records current, plans the activity due, reports on where each client stands, and handles content scheduling, production and approval.

  1. Keep the client record and stage current in Notion.
  2. Plan and schedule the activity each client is owed.
  3. Route the work for approval, then report on what went out.

Newsletter planning agent

Plans the newsletter around what is on: the season, the activities underway, the sponsorship and product promotions due, and the festivals and special events happening in the region.

  1. Read the season and the regional calendar.
  2. Pull the sponsorship and product promotions due.
  3. Hand a structured plan to production.

Guardrail. Every placement in the plan traces to a real event or a live commitment.

Sponsorship placement agent

Finds the right slot for each sponsor, based on what the contract commits to and how the theme fits. It keeps competing sponsors apart and holds the agreed cadence.

  1. Read the contract and what it commits to.
  2. Match the sponsor to a theme that fits.
  3. Check for conflicts, then hold the cadence across the schedule.

Guardrail. Competing sponsors stay in separate placements, and each contract is delivered in full.

What I learned

  1. Clear processes are the key. Every task, whether a person or an agent runs it, needs a defined process.
  2. Define the outcome first. A clear picture of what success looks like, and the criteria for it, is the most critical part of getting there.
  3. Stay in control of the logic. Watching how the AI reasons and executes prevents most troubleshooting later.
  4. Set boundaries and goals early. It saves hours of reworking.
  5. It is easier to build it right from the start than to fix it later.
  6. No agent is ever finished. Even a well-designed one needs polishing, review and sometimes a rebuild as the task evolves.

Want the build story step by step? Read the build playbook

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