A specialist firm where answering client email was the last thing nobody had automated
Built a client-email assistant that reads each incoming question, pulls the relevant facts from the firm's own reference material and client files, and writes a grounded draft reply for a licensed broker to review and send, so the specialist edits and approves instead of composing every answer from a blank page.
This firm had already done the unglamorous work. The internal tools were connected, the data flowed between them, and there was very little manual re-keying left between systems. By most measures they were ahead of their peers.
What hadn't moved was the inbox. Clients send a steady stream of questions by email, each one needing a correct, defensible answer drawn from regulation and the client's own file, and every one of those answers came out of a senior specialist's head, one reply at a time. It was the single biggest remaining drain on the people whose time was worth the most. When the partner was asked what he would automate if he could pick only one thing, the answer was immediate: the email. Not because the firm lacked tools, but because there was no tool that could read a client's question and draft the reply a specialist would actually stand behind.
We did not try to take the specialist out of the loop. We took the blank page away.
The assistant watches the incoming client questions, classifies what each one is asking, and gathers the facts that bear on it: the relevant rule, the client's own history and file, and the firm's prior answers to similar questions. It then writes a draft reply in the firm's voice, with the references it relied on attached, and routes it to the right specialist. The specialist reads, corrects what needs correcting, and sends. Anything the assistant is not confident about is flagged rather than guessed, so a thin or unusual question lands as a clearly-marked draft for a human, never as a wrong answer sent automatically.
The work that used to start from nothing now starts from a draft. Specialists spend their email time reviewing and adjusting answers instead of composing them, and the routine questions that used to interrupt the day are handled in a fraction of the time. Each specialist gets back about ten hours a week, and those hours go to the advisory work clients actually pay for.
The firm also has something it did not have before: every client answer now carries the references it was built on, and similar questions get consistent answers regardless of who is at the desk that day. The senior people stopped being a bottleneck on the inbox without the firm ever sending a reply no one had read.
“If I could automate one thing, it would be the email. It eats the day, and what I really wanted was something that could answer a client the way one of my specialists would, so we just have to check it.”
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