Professional services firm · ~30 staff
They asked for automation and needed a foundation first.
The firm came asking for AI automation, but had no written rules, no list of its systems, and no single view of its own numbers. Building automation on that footing would have meant automating chaos.
Representative profile. Feature names are typical.
The work
What we did, and why
The first meeting was a request for an AI assistant that drafts proposals. The second meeting was the policy conversation. There were no written rules, no list of the AI tools already in use, and no agreed view of which systems held the data an assistant would need.
The firm accepted the recommendation. The review took three weeks. The applications assessment found that the CRM, the system that tracks clients and sales, and the time-tracking system, connected together, answered most of what leadership had been asking for. The base dashboard went live in the firm's own Microsoft cloud account in the first quarter. Its standard report on technology costs showed two duplicate subscriptions on the way.
Automation development started in the second quarter, with the dashboard showing where the manual hours went. The client intake summary and unbilled time alerts shipped first. The proposal-drafting assistant the firm originally asked for is in policy review, because it touches client contract data and the AI Use Policy says that needs a named owner.
Where they stand
The outcome
The automation they originally asked for is being built into the platform they now own, under their policy, fed by their systems, on the subscription they already pay for.
For leadership
What changed
The managing director got the automation, six months later than hoped and on a foundation that will hold. The intake summary feature now drafts what an associate used to type.
This is a representative profile, drawn from the kinds of companies we work with. Figures are illustrative. We publish named results only with a client's written permission.
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