Case study · Our own company

How we run Kaizen on AI

An AI agent does the routine work of running our company. It sorts email, writes up meetings, reads contractor invoices, drafts client invoices, follows up on late work and reviews new federal awards. It prepares the work, and a person approves anything that leaves the company. We build the same kind of system for clients, so this page shows what it does and the rules it follows.

In use since
2025
Email sorted
Every 5 minutes
Email, invoices and messages
Sent only after a person approves
Raw meeting transcripts
Deleted within 24 hours

The rules it follows

Most of the work is done by scheduled jobs: one for email, one for meetings, one for invoices, and so on. Those jobs only record what they find. One agent reads their findings and decides what happens next. That separation is the most important design decision in the system.

One agent decides what reaches a person Scheduled jobs for email, meetings, invoices and deadlines only record what they find. One operations agent reads their findings and sends each one to one of three places: a phone alert tied to a work item for something urgent, the 9 am or 1 pm briefing for something that can wait, or a draft that goes out only after a person approves it. SCHEDULED JOBS: THEY ONLY RECORD WHAT THEY FIND URGENT CAN WAIT GOES OUT Email sorting EVERY 5 MINUTES Meeting notes AS RECORDINGS FINISH Invoices and bills DAILY AND MONTHLY Deadlines and new awards EVERY WEEKDAY MORNING Operations agent: one rule for what interrupts a person CHECKS EVERY 15 MINUTES · WHEN IN DOUBT, IT WAITS Phone alert OPENS A WORK ITEM REPEATS AT MOST EVERY 6 HOURS Briefing at 9 am and 1 pm EACH ITEM CHECKED AGAIN BEFORE IT IS SHOWN Draft for a person to approve EMAIL, INVOICE OR MESSAGE SENT ONLY WHEN A PERSON TAPS SEND LEGEND JOB OR RESULT THE AGENT THAT DECIDES NEEDS A PERSON
Each job records what it finds. The operations agent sends each finding to one of three places: a phone alert for something urgent, the next briefing for something that can wait, or a draft that goes out only after a person approves it.
One agent decides what interrupts a person
It interrupts for four things only: a deadline today or tomorrow that nobody has seen, something broken that blocks the team, a person waiting on a same-day decision, and an urgent request from a client. Everything else waits for the next briefing.
Nothing leaves the company without a person
The agent has no tool that sends email or messages. It writes a draft, and the draft goes out only when a person taps Send. Invoices and payments work the same way.
Every alert opens a work item
A phone alert links to the record behind it, so the person can act at once. A repeat alert about the same item waits at least six hours, unless the facts have changed.
No news means no message
Jobs do not send "all clear" messages. The afternoon briefing is skipped when nothing has changed since the morning.
Each person sees only their own records
Contractors use the same agent through Slack, but it works with their permissions and their records only. A message from someone it does not recognize gets no answer.
Every run is recorded
Each run records its steps and its result. When a job fails, the failure becomes a work item, so no job can stop without someone knowing.

A working day

All day, email is sorted every five minutes, the agent checks for anything urgent every fifteen minutes, and meeting notes are written as each recording finishes. On top of that, a weekday runs like this.

6:00 am
Meeting preparation
A short brief for each meeting on the day's calendar, with background on anyone new.
6:30 am
Day plan
Up to three proposed priorities and calendar blocks. The founder accepts or declines each one.
7:00 am
Renewals and purchase orders
Contracts, insurance policies and certificates due in the next 60 days, and purchase orders close to their limit.
8:00 am
New opportunities
New National Science Foundation awards and Virginia technology solicitations, each assessed for fit. For a strong match, it drafts a first message for a person to send.
9:00 am
Morning briefing
Everything that waited overnight, with each item checked again against its record.
10:00 am
Follow-up on waiting items
When someone has not replied for three business days, it drafts a polite reminder. At most three a day, and never two to the same thread within a week.
12:00 pm
Contractor invoices
Invoices are read from email and checked against logged time, the agreed rate and the billing period.
1:00 pm
Afternoon briefing
Only when something changed since the morning. Otherwise it is skipped.
6:15 pm
Day recap
What was done, what moved, and what is waiting for tomorrow.

What it does, by area

Email
Fixed rules sort most mail, and AI sorts the rest. Routine mail is archived, mail that is only for information is summarized, and the rest stays in the inbox. When a client asks to schedule a meeting, an alert goes out at once, with no AI step in between. Replies to routine mail are drafted for approval.
Meetings
Within minutes of a recording ending, the meeting has a summary and a list of action items, without duplicates and linked to existing tickets. New tickets are suggested for a person to accept. The raw transcript is deleted when the summary is saved, and after 24 hours at the latest.
Invoices and payments
A contractor bill that matches logged time within one dollar waits for the payment run every other Friday, and a person confirms that run. A bill that does not match goes to a person first. Client invoices are drafted on the first of each month. A person approves the invoice, then approves sending it, in two separate steps.
Projects and follow-up
Tasks with a due date are tracked automatically. When a flexible date slips once, the owner gets a reminder two business days later and the manager is not told. A second slip, or any slip on a client deadline, goes to the manager at once. Twice a week, each person's list is drafted as a message that the manager approves before it is sent.
Contracts and documents
Contracts, insurance policies and certificates are checked for renewal dates. Scanned paper documents are read, sorted and filed.
New business
New National Science Foundation awards and Virginia technology solicitations are assessed every weekday. A person decides whether to reach out, and a person sends the message.
This website
Search and traffic data is collected every day and reviewed every week. The agent may publish at most one article a week on this site. Each one passes an independent review of its claims, the same build, link and accessibility checks as every other page, and a check of the live page. A failed release is rolled back. Social media posts stay as drafts.
Software work
Small coding tasks can be assigned to the agent. It works only in approved code repositories, and its work ends as a change for an engineer to review. It never marks its own task as done.
Company knowledge
Our internal reference library is checked one section at a time, every night, and errors are corrected. Email and meeting notes add to it as they arrive.

What we changed along the way

We started with a separate agent for each specialty. Each one could interrupt us on its own. Each alert made sense by itself, but together they were noise. Now one agent decides what reaches a person, and the specialists became scheduled jobs. We wrote up that change.

We changed the software the agent runs on twice. Each job's instructions are kept in plain text files, separate from the software. On the second move, every job moved in one day.

We made alerts point at work. An alert that only says something happened makes a person go looking. An alert that opens the work item, with its owner, date and history, can be acted on straight away.

What this means for your project

Most of these jobs are common to any organization: an inbox, invoices, meeting notes, follow-up and reporting. The rules above took us the longest to get right, and they are what we bring to each client project: one place that decides what interrupts people, drafts that wait for a person, and a record of every run.

If you have work like this, the AI Workflow Review prices two or three of your workflows in two weeks and tells you which to build first.

Want the same for your organization?

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