Most small firms I meet have tried an AI chat tool by now. Someone pastes in a GP letter and asks for a summary, or asks it to word a difficult email. It does that well. Then they copy the result into the spreadsheet, or the calendar, or the accounts package, and the rest of the afternoon looks exactly as it did last year.
I spent a long time thinking that was the ceiling. A clever colleague you can ask things, who never touches the actual work. What changed my mind was watching the same text box do something else: read a referral into the case, book the session, send the email, raise the invoice. Same conversation, with a different thing behind it: the first kind of tool knows things, the second kind can do them.
A Monday, twice
Here is a morning in a small assessment practice, the sort we build for. A referral has come in as a PDF. Two clients still have not returned a questionnaire. One session has to move to Thursday. It is the 28th and nobody has started the month’s invoices.
With a chat adviser, each of those gets a helpful answer. What the PDF says. A decent chasing email. A reminder of what to check before you move a session. Then you type it all in, across four tools and four windows.
With the assistant connected to those tools, the same requests simply happen. “Register this referral” creates the case and the client folder from the document, and lists what the form left out. “Who needs following up?” comes back from the live record rather than from whoever remembers. “Move Tuesday’s session to Thursday at 2pm” shifts the event, refreshes the meeting link and puts the email to the client in front of you. “Invoice every client for September” reads each case’s unbilled items and drafts the invoices in the accounts package. In the practice we run, that last one takes about five minutes. It used to take most of a day, though I should say we never timed the old way properly, so treat that as memory rather than measurement.
What the tools were missing
A small firm already pays for the pieces: a calendar, email, somewhere documents live, an accounts package, and usually a spreadsheet that has quietly become the system of record because it was there first. None of these is the problem. People know them and the data is in them. Nobody I have met wants to migrate.
What is missing is anything that acts across them. One plain request implies four or five actions in four or five places, and a person has been doing the joining up by hand. The assistant takes that joining-up over. It sits in the middle with access to each tool and turns “book her for Thursday” into the calendar event, the email, the note on the case and the billing row, together, because they belong together.
It works more like glue than like a new app: the tools stay where they are, and the typing between them goes away.
Why I was nervous about it, and what settled it
An assistant that can send email and raise invoices is a different animal from one that just talks, and for a while I did not want to build one. A wrong summary wastes a minute. A wrong email to the wrong person is a complaint, or worse. What makes it safe is the set of rules around it, and most of them turned out to be rules a good practice manager already follows by hand.
Reading costs nothing; writing is confirmed. A summary, a search, the overdue list: answered straight away. Anything that changes a record, sends a message, moves an appointment or raises an invoice shows up first as a preview: the actual email, the actual invoice, or the before and after of a record change. A person confirms it or bins it, and one confirmation sends it.
It is all on the record. Each confirmed action is logged with who confirmed it and when, which is the standard referrers and auditors already expect. The assistant did not make that harder. It made it happen without anyone remembering to.
It can only write where the case allows. Emails go to the addresses that belong to that case. If the record changes under a preview before you press confirm, the preview refuses rather than guessing. Deleting anything for good needs an administrator and a typed confirmation, which is deliberately annoying.
And the data does not move. It stays in the systems the firm already runs and administers. The text the assistant drafts passes through the model provider under commercial terms that rule out training on it, with a processing agreement signed before anything goes live.
None of it is clever. It is the discipline of a careful person, written down so that it still holds on a busy Thursday.
Two examples: one person, then one practice
The smallest version of this is mine. For some months I have run my own admin through an assistant I call Hermes. It lives on a small server rather than on my laptop, so it does not stop when I shut the lid. I talk to it from my phone, typed or spoken. It has my calendars, my mailboxes and my documents, it keeps its own notes on what I have told it, and at one o’clock each day it goes through the inboxes and tells me what actually needs an answer. It drafts replies; it sends them when I say so. One rule I added early and have not regretted: a job that runs on a timer is never allowed to send anything. That is the rule that lets me leave it running overnight without checking.
Cassie is the same idea with more people in it and more at stake. It runs a vocational rehabilitation practice today. The team does most of the day through conversation; there are around seventy actions available, roughly two-thirds of them read-only. The spreadsheet that used to be the system of record is gone. The thirteen email templates that someone used to pick and fill in by hand now go out at the right stage of the case, previewed first. Month-end invoicing for the whole practice is the five minutes I mentioned. The practice belongs to my co-founder, which is why every feature was argued over by the person who has to use it, sometimes at length.
Those are the figures we have. We do not publish hours saved, because we have not measured them, and I am wary of numbers that arrive before the measuring does.
Why this is now a small-firm thing
Big organisations are building their operating systems on top engineering teams: assistants wired into their own systems, and people whose whole job is to look after them. A small firm, meanwhile, is still looking for the statement that was definitely in the inbox last week. The parts that make the rest possible have become ordinary in the last year or two: models that can read a scanned form, calendars and mailboxes with proper interfaces, accounts packages that will accept a draft invoice from outside. What was left was the joining-up, built around the way one practice actually works rather than the way a product manager imagines a thousand of them work.
That is the part we do. It starts with a two-hour audit: where an assistant could take the work on in your firm, where a person has to stay in the loop, what your current tools already do, and what order to do it in. The report is yours whatever you decide, and “change nothing” is a real answer we give. If we build, each phase has a price and an outcome before you commit, and your records stay where they are.
If your week is mostly the emails, the bookings, the forms and the invoices, the first step is a twenty-minute call, and it has two questions in it: what are you using, and what do you pay for it a month?
Pawel Dobrzynski is mgctech’s CTO. He built Cassie and runs the audits himself.