Rick Chorney is 29 years old, runs a cleaning company out of Abbotsford, British Columbia, and is on pace to clear $1.3 million in sales this year. Three years ago, he was pulling $14 an hour subcontracting janitorial jobs across the Vancouver suburbs, working 7 a.m. to 1 a.m., seven days a week. The difference between then and now is a stack of AI agents that handle the work he used to do himself, badly, and exhausted.
Fortune profiled Chorney this week, verifying his business records and documenting the revenue trajectory: $242,000 in his first year, just under $1 million last year, and a projected $1.3 million in 2026. Fortune reviewed his financials directly.
What the AI Stack Actually Does
Echo Janitorial Services, which Chorney co-founded in 2023 with his childhood friend Adrian, runs on a collection of AI tools that replaced the administrative overhead that was grinding Chorney into the ground.
An AI receptionist, powered by Jobber, fields up to 15 phone calls an hour. Customer intake forms auto-populate into his job management platform. Automated acknowledgment messages go out to new clients without Chorney touching them. He told Fortune the initial setup took half a day.
Then there’s Claude, which Chorney describes less as a productivity tool and more as a business advisor. He uses it to navigate BC labor law for HR situations, build client-facing case studies on the spot, and document operations for a potential franchise expansion. In one recent meeting, he had Claude generate a cost comparison showing a client why paying Echo $1,000 more per month was cheaper than hiring in-house cleaners. It closed the deal.
“One deals with all your social media. One deals with all your customer inquiries. It will respond to emails, answer text messages and phone calls,” Chorney told Fortune, listing off his AI agents. Another handles bank statement analysis and cash flow projections.
The result: Chorney now works 8-hour days, employs 16 cleaners and two business partners, and takes vacations. His first vacation came shortly after the initial AI setup, when he and a partner drove from BC to Montreal for a UFC event and spent six weeks on the road.
The Macro Picture
Chorney’s trajectory isn’t an isolated case. Torsten Slok, chief economist at Apollo Global Management, wrote in his Daily Spark blog that AI tools are “dramatically reducing the cost and complexity of launching a company,” citing US Census Bureau data showing a surge in new business formation. On the Prof G Markets podcast, Slok added: “People are inventing new businesses in a way that we just have not seen, literally for decades.”
Forrest Zeisler, co-founder and CTO of Jobber, told Fortune that Chorney represents a broader pattern across the platform’s customer base. “No one’s going to benefit more than the small blue-collar businesses from AI,” Zeisler said. “For them, time is literally money. They’re out and about in the field, not sitting at a computer.”
Why It Matters for Agent Builders
The AI agent conversation tends to focus on developers, enterprise deployments, and infrastructure. Chorney’s story is a data point from a completely different direction: a first-generation entrepreneur with no formal training, no coding skills, and no institutional resources, using off-the-shelf AI tools to compress years of scaling pain into months.
He didn’t build custom agents. He assembled existing ones: Claude for strategy and documents, an AI receptionist for phones, automated workflows for intake and messaging. The total setup time was measured in hours, not sprints.
That’s the profile of AI agent adoption that scales fastest: people who have clear, painful operational bottlenecks and zero attachment to how things were done before.