Case study · AI automation
A smarter enquiry workflow that captures leads, understands what customers need, prepares useful information and creates personalised follow-up ready for human review.
A lead arrives
Imagine a potential customer completes an enquiry form. Normally, somebody now needs to read it, understand it, decide what matters and work out what happens next.
What happens next?
The customer sees a normal enquiry form. Behind it, the repetitive work begins to happen automatically.
Capture
The original enquiry is automatically added to a central lead database.
Nothing is rewritten or lost. The customer's original answers remain available as the source of truth.
Understand
Instead of simply storing form answers, the workflow identifies information that could help someone understand the opportunity.
Summarise
A concise summary is prepared so the enquiry can be understood quickly without replacing the customer's original message.
Established business looking to modernise an existing WordPress website and improve how incoming enquiries are managed.
The customer has provided a defined budget, a near-term timeline and is interested in both website development and automation.
Prepare
Using the original enquiry and the information gathered from it, the workflow creates a suggested response.
It can acknowledge what the customer is looking for, refer to relevant details and suggest a sensible next step.
Hi Jamie,
Thanks for getting in touch. It sounds like there could be an opportunity to improve both your website and the way incoming enquiries are handled...
Review
The response is created as a Email draft rather than being sent automatically.
It can be reviewed, edited or discarded before anything reaches the customer.
The difference
Without automation
With the workflow
Behind the scenes
The customer doesn't need to see any of this. They simply submit an enquiry as normal.
The less glamorous bit
Automation is easy to demonstrate when everything goes perfectly. Building it to behave sensibly when something doesn't go perfectly matters more.
Once an enquiry has been handled, the workflow records what has already happened.
Running it again does not create another AI analysis, notification or email draft.
Important information such as email addresses is checked before actions that rely on it take place.
Bad or incomplete data does not simply get pushed through the rest of the workflow.
AI-generated information is added alongside the customer's original enquiry rather than replacing it.
There is always a clear record of what the customer actually submitted.
The system prepares the work.
The final customer communication remains under human control.
The test
No invented productivity figures. No hypothetical conversion uplift. Just a working system doing what it was designed to do.
The bigger idea
This workflow happens to connect an enquiry form, Google Sheets, AI and email.
Another business might need enquiries routed to different people, CRM opportunities created, quote information generated, appointments prepared or follow-up tasks created.
The technology should follow the way the business needs to work — not the other way around.
So the useful question isn't:
“Where can we add AI?”
It's:
What repetitive work happens around your customer enquiries?
About this project
This project was created as a real-world demonstration of how I approach AI automation for small businesses.
Rather than creating a theoretical concept, I built a functioning workflow using real tools, real automation logic and safeguards that would also matter in a client implementation.
It continues to evolve as I test where AI genuinely saves time — and where a human should stay involved.
Your process
You don't need to know what should be automated. Start with what currently happens when a customer contacts your business.
Tell me about your process →