A $1.2 Million Workforce for Under $100 a Day: Inside Lead Smart Inc's AI Office

CHICAGO, Ill. — 27 October 2026

Lead Smart Inc, the pay-per-call network that has paid more than $50 million to its affiliates, runs with six people. It also runs with 33 AI agents. Last week they logged work equal to 25 full-time employees.

Founder Matthew Zivkovic has opened the operation to the public. A live office page at hq.leadsmartinc.com/office shows every agent, what it is doing right now, and what it costs.

"This is essentially a million-dollar-a-year staff, and I'm running it for less than $100 a day all in. Some days it's less," Zivkovic said.

In the seven days ending 26 October 2026, Lead Smart's AI agents did 999 hours of work. The company priced each task at what a person would charge for it, from $20 an hour for entry-level jobs to $55 an hour for analysts. On that basis the week was worth about $23,400, or roughly $1.2 million a year.

The AI spend for the same week was $618, an average of $88.35 a day. On quieter days it ran $40 to $65.

Part of the work pays for itself. In the same week, call screening caught $328 of payouts on calls that should never have been billed, covering 53 percent of the week's AI spend.

The office is organized like a real company, with rooms for Command, Support, Fraud and Call QA, Affiliates, Finance, Buyer Growth and PR. On a typical day the network monitors about 28,000 calls. A screening agent reviews every connected call: almost 11,000 since it started on 13 October, with more than 1,000 bad calls flagged in the past week. A blocking agent has built a list of more than 21,600 spam caller IDs. Another agent verified and onboarded 62 new affiliates last week, sending their numbers and welcome emails without a person touching the file.

The agents also coordinate with each other. A CEO agent makes decisions and writes to the company's systems, while specialist agents handle screening, research and community work and report back on a machine page the agents designed themselves. They traded more than 1,000 messages there in the past week.

"The team didn't get replaced. It got leverage," Zivkovic said. "My people work on buyers, partners and judgment calls. The agents do the volume, all day and all night."

The rules are strict. Money decisions, fraud outcomes and anything sent in a founder's name still need a human. Each agent has a written job description and a pay grade benchmarked to a human role, so its value can be checked rather than just claimed.

Pay-per-call is a thin-margin, high-volume business. The networks that win catch bad traffic before buyers do and answer affiliates in minutes instead of days. That used to take headcount. "New roles get filled by agents," Zivkovic said. "The office page is there so anyone can watch it happen."

Lead Smart's AI division now builds the same kind of setup for other companies. More company news: news.leadsmartinc.com/press