Field Guide · onboarding
Onboarding Your AI Marketer: A Thirty-Day Plan for an Inbound BDR and a Strategist
Two specialist marketing agents in thirty days. The shape of the first week, the second, the third, and the fourth — and what the team should be doing instead of installing AI in the same time.
Onboarding plans for AI agents are mostly written for the generic agent. Real onboarding is role-specific. This piece is the thirty-day plan for the marketing pair the platform ships — VYRA-01 (Mira, the inbound BDR) and VEXA-01 (Beatrix, the marketing strategist) — laid out week by week. The plan is the same shape for any specialist pair on the Roster; the specifics here are what the marketing version actually looks like when the team installs in week one and produces real work by week four.
Why it matters
A buying decision is not the same as a deployment decision, and most teams confuse them. The buyer who has signed the contract has not yet earned the team's trust in the agent. That trust comes from the team watching the agent work for thirty days. A clear plan for those thirty days — what happens when, what the team's role is, what the agent does and does not do — is the difference between an agent the team trusts in week five and an agent the team is still wary of in month four.
Two agents on day one. VYRA-01, configured to read the inbound feeds — competitor announcements, the analytics dashboard, mentions across the public web. VEXA-01, configured to read the marketing channel and the request thread where the team puts brief asks. Both pre-scoped to the right channels at install. Both in read-only mode. The marketing lead — a real human on the team — is the agents' manager, and the escalation path posts to her DMs.
Week one: read-only and corpus loading.
The agents do not post in week one. They read. The team adds them to the channels they are supposed to live in, ignores them otherwise, and goes about regular work. In the background, the agents are loading the corpus — past briefs, current style guides, competitor profile docs, the brand voice document the team has been meaning to update. The team's only job in week one is to answer the agents' clarifying questions in the dedicated thread, which arrive at a rate of about one a day per agent.
VYRA-01 needs to know which competitors matter, which signals to escalate, and which to summarize. VEXA-01 needs to know what counts as a brief in this team, which prior briefs are exemplary and which were rejected, and what the team's voice rules are. The clarifying questions are the agent learning the team's register. Answering them takes about thirty minutes a day for the lead.
Week two: shadow drafts and team review.
The agents start posting, but in shadow mode. VYRA-01 posts the inbound monitoring rollup in the marketing channel every morning. The team reads it the way they would read a research email — they don't act on it. VEXA-01 drafts briefs in a private staging doc when the team posts a request, and the team reads the draft against what the human strategist would have produced. Neither agent ships work to anywhere customer-facing or partner-facing yet.
The team's job in week two is to react. Tell VYRA-01 in the thread when the rollup missed something obvious, when the priority order is wrong, when the framing of an alert was off. Tell VEXA-01 the same about the briefs — what the angle missed, where the structure failed, which sentence is doing too much. The agent updates its constitution from those notes; the lead reviews the constitution updates at the end of the week.
Week three: light production.
If the team has signed off on the shadow work, the agents start producing. VYRA-01 starts posting the morning rollup in the channel proper. VEXA-01 starts producing first-cut briefs that the strategist edits and the team reviews. The work is going to imperfect places — internal docs, internal channels — and the team is checking each output against what it would have produced manually. This is the week the team most often considers backing out, because the work the agent ships is not yet identical to what a human would have produced. The honest answer is that it isn't supposed to be. It's supposed to be close enough that editing is faster than starting from scratch. By the end of week three, that becomes obviously true on most outputs.
Week four: production and limit-list refinement.
The agents are producing. The team reads, edits, and ships the output. The lead reviews the limit list at the end of the week — which capabilities to relax, which to tighten, which to add. The constitution gets its first real revision based on what the team has watched the agents do for three weeks. The platform takes the revision and updates the agent. The next month is more of the same, with progressively less editing required.
What the team is doing instead of installing AI.
Throughout the four weeks, the team is doing its regular work. The agents do not require the team to stop. The lead spends thirty minutes a day on agent feedback in week one, less in week two, and almost none by week four. Other teammates are unaffected for the first two weeks and start engaging with the agents' output the same way they engage with any other coworker's work in week three. The four-week shape is the agents adapting to the team, not the team rearranging itself for the agents.
The edge
The reason the four-week shape works is that it matches how a real hire is onboarded. A new marketer in week one shadows the team. In week two, drafts are reviewed before they ship. In week three, the work goes out under supervision. In week four, the new hire is on production. The agent runs the same arc with the same review gates because the same arc is what produces trust. Buyers who try to compress this into one week — install Friday, production Monday — produce agents the team distrusts and stops using. The math of the four-week onboarding is conservative on day one and faster on day ninety than the compressed version ever gets.
Honest take
This plan assumes a marketing team that has the lead's attention for thirty minutes a day in week one. Some teams do not. If the lead is in product launches, board prep, or a hiring crunch in the first week of onboarding, the agents will start without the corpus they need and the four-week shape gets noisy. The right move in that case is to delay the start, not to compress the plan. The deployment plan can wait two or three weeks for the team to be ready, and that is a cheaper outcome than starting anyway. Recovery is more expensive than waiting.
Two specialist marketing agents, four weeks, a real plan that matches how teams actually absorb a new hire. The agents ship on day thirty because the team trusts them; the team trusts them because the four weeks were what trust looks like.