AI Agents at Work: Inside the Vortex IQ Crew Office
Every character you are about to see is an AI agent at work for a merchant. The hard hats, the headsets, the tiny books are cosmetic. The work is real.
Vortex IQ agents already audit stores, apply fixes, answer data questions, write reports and rehearse migrations. The problem is that all of it happens invisibly, inside queues and schedules. Invisible work is easy to undervalue and hard to trust, no matter how good it is.
Why we gave our agents an office
So we ran a lab experiment: render the agent teams as characters in a pixel office, animated only by real backend events. One honesty rule governs everything: the office never lies. If an agent is idle, it looks idle. If it is reading your robots.txt, that is what it is doing.
If an agent needs your approval, it stands at the gate until a human says go.
Nine crews, each with one job for your store
- Store Audit Crew finds what is broken, risky or quietly costing money
- Fix Crew turns findings into reversible changes, with approval gates
- SEO / GEO Studio makes the store readable to people, search engines and AI answers
- Ask Viq Data Desk answers questions with numbers that cite their source connector
- Vortex Mind Crew turns KPI history into one-page reports
- Migration Crew rehearses every move with a dry run before any cutover
- Nerve Centre Watch notices a KPI drop before the merchant does
- AdEngine Crew pauses losing ad sets and scales winners with guardrails
- Vortex Memory Desk files what every run teaches, per merchant
It runs on real merchant work
The storylines are seeded from a genuine store audit of our BigCommerce demo store: a health score of 68/100 and 24 findings, including a robots.txt that blocked more than 40 AI crawlers (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot), a missing llms.txt and no schema markup. When the Fix Crew pauses for sign-off, it is because the real fix plan requires approval. Nothing in the office is choreographed for show.
Characters your team can name
Every agent has a name, a role and a crew uniform. The names are yours: rename Scout to Nigel in the crew directory and your audit floor is led by Nigel from the next run. Roles and skills stay fixed, because the craft does not change with the name.
The part that actually matters: memory
Each character carries two kinds of knowledge. Global skills are the craft, identical for every merchant. Per-merchant memory is what an agent has learned about your store specifically: baselines, catalog quirks, which changes you like to approve manually. The crew that shows up on your store already knows your store, and it gets smarter with every run. A dedicated librarian, Memo, files new facts, retires stale ones and serves recall to any crew that asks.
What is real today
First, the important part: the agents are real, and their actions are live in production today. Store audits, fixes, reports, data answers and migration rehearsals already run inside the Vortex IQ platform for real merchants. None of that is a prototype, and nothing you see the crew doing is staged.
The lab experiment is the animated visualisation: the pixel office that makes this live work visible. It is built on the open-source pixel-agents engine with our own characters and event streams, and we are sharing it early. If merchants love watching their crew at work as much as we do, the office will land in the product as an ambient view.
We will post one crew’s working day every week on LinkedIn. And if you want to know what an audit crew would find on your own store, run a free store audit.
