Spend a week on LinkedIn and you'll come away believing that data is the key to AI. Connect your CRM, your document system, your accounting, your inbox, and the AI will finally know your business. It's usually said by someone who sells integrations.
It isn't wrong, exactly. It's early. For most firms I work with, connecting the data first is the slow, expensive path to a smaller result.
What data doesn't tell anyone
Give an assistant access to your CRM and it can tell you a client's phone number and the date of their last meeting. What it can't tell you is what your firm does next. Do you call them, or does the partner? Is this the kind of client you check with compliance about first? Is that field even kept up to date, or does everyone know to ignore it?
Data is the what. It doesn't carry the how, the when, the why, or how careful to be. Those live in people's heads and in a few documents nobody can find. An AI connected to all your systems, without them, is a new hire with keys to every room and no idea which ones they're supposed to be in.
The waste nobody counts
Here's what happens instead, in almost every firm with more than about ten people.
Each team lead knows their function inside out. Each of them, at some point, tries to teach it to everyone else: a brown bag, a long Slack message, a walkthrough for the new hire. Everyone else nods, forgets most of it, and goes back to their own work. Then, a month later, they message the team lead to ask the same question.
That's backwards. The people in accounts shouldn't need to learn how the closing team works, and the closing team shouldn't need to learn how accounts works. Asking everyone to hold every team's process in their head is a waste of human attention, which is the scarcest thing a firm has.
What people actually need is one place to go that knows the rules: how work runs inside each team, and how it hands off between them. It should answer two kinds of question without anyone being interrupted:
- What's the rule here? How does our firm do this?
- Who decides, and where does it go next? If the rule isn't enough, which person or team owns it?
Answer those two well and most of the direct messages, phone calls and "quick questions" in a firm go away. Nobody had to connect a single system.
What you can do this month
You don't need a vendor to start. Pick the places where work passes from one person or team to another, because that's where most of the confusion lives.
- List the questions people ask each other. Look at a week of direct messages and hallway questions. The same twenty come up again and again.
- Write down each answer, and who owns it. The rule in plain language, and the person or role who decides when the rule doesn't cover it.
- Write down the handoffs. For each one, what has to be true before work moves on, and who it moves to.
- Put it where everyone can reach it. Then point people there instead of answering the question again.
That's it. It's not glamorous, and it works for a firm of fifteen as well as a firm of a hundred.
When the data does matter
There's a point where process stops being enough, and it's easy to recognize: the question is about a specific record. Which of my listings went under contract this week? What's the balance on this account? Has this client signed the engagement letter? No amount of written process answers those. That's when a live connection earns its cost.
The good news is that by then you know exactly which connection you need, because the questions people couldn't get answered tell you. You connect one system, for a reason you can name, and the assistant already knows what your firm does with what it finds there.
How we do it
This is the order we work in. We start by writing down how your firm works: the rules, who decides, and the handoffs. That becomes a guide your people can ask from the Claude or ChatGPT account they already have, or from our iPhone app. It's read-only, a copy of how you work rather than a connection to your systems, so nothing it does can change a record.
Every month we look at the questions it couldn't answer. Most of them are process we hadn't written down yet, and we add them. Some of them are questions about specific records. When enough of those pile up to make a clear case, we talk about connecting the system they point to, reading it where it lives rather than copying it. Many firms never need that step, and we'll tell you if you're one of them.