No qualified staff in Chrudim, so Czech fashion founder turned to AI

The founder of the Czech fashion brand Buga, Petra Šindlerová, could not find qualified specialists in her hometown of Chrudim — so she decided to plug the staffing gap with artificial intelligence. By the end of September the entrepreneur plans to roll out 37 AI agents at the company, and hopes this will let part of her team move to a four-day work week.

Now 44, Šindlerová has been building the Buga brand for thirteen years. Trained as an economist, she didn't know how to sew at all — she bought her first sewing machine at Lidl for a thousand crowns and gradually, together with her husband Ondřej, turned the project into a recognizable brand with a loyal community of customers. Last year the women's line was joined by a men's label, Lucky Boy, and the company's total revenue reached about 150 million crowns.

The staffing shortage was acute: production and the office are based in Chrudim rather than in a major city, which made it almost impossible to find experienced senior specialists. “We don't have qualified people in the area,” Šindlerová admits. Instead of hiring, the company began building its own structure of AI agents — not as a replacement for people, but as a “second supporting brain” that lets a junior employee handle senior-level tasks.

The couple taught themselves so-called vibe coding — programming for non-programmers — drawing inspiration from other specialists in the field. A key step was creating the company's shared “memory”: a system called Eyva, from which all the agents draw the same reliable information about processes, agreements with clients and internal rules. Without such a foundation, the entrepreneur says, each agent would be a “smart orphan,” inventing its own version of reality.

The first agent to go live was a copywriter — that is where the system's rollout across the team began. Each agent has something like a “birth certificate”: a name, a clearly defined task, a list of what it can do on its own, what it must clear with a human, and what it is forbidden from doing under any circumstances, even with approval.

For Šindlerová, introducing AI turned out to be not only a technological experience but an emotional one — she says that while sorting through company data that used to take weeks but now gets resolved in an hour with artificial intelligence, she cried more than once, realizing how much time and money the business had been losing before.