Is anyone here targeting people/businesses that use human Virtual Assistants/VAs and attempting to replace them with some form of AI Agents? If so, how is that going? Have you been successful at replacing the repetitive tasks of a low paid human, and if so, how much is this worth to your clients as a percentage of what they were previously paying their VAs?

What is the cheapest LLM you have found to do research (not creative) tasks? This agent would need to use tools like web searching and web scraping and be able to follow directions well. I have tried gpt-4o-mini and it does not seem to follow directions very well and does not seem to want to scrape websites although it will do an ok job of searching the web with serper. Gpt-4o does a better job, but is more expensive. What is your experience?