An interiors firm's AI bots filed 2,773 emails and processed 71 invoices in 11 days

3 · Setup steps

How to do it yourself

Our suggested steps. The company didn't publish theirs.

1. 1

   Start with one inbox job: filing email into folders and moving obvious junk. Check what it moved every day for the first week.

2. 2

   Put every bid or job invite on one shared board (a spreadsheet is fine), so none sit unread in the inbox.

3. 3

   Add one back-office job next, such as logging supplier invoices or applying timesheet edits, with a person approving anything that gets paid.

4. 4

   Have each bot keep a log, and count its work every week (emails filed, invoices processed, edits applied).

5. 5

   Give new bots read-only access first, the way this firm is testing its estimating bot against past bids.

4 · The prompt

The instructions to give the AI

Paste this into Grok (xAI), swap the [brackets] for your details, and test it on a few real examples.

This is one part of the setup. It won't connect to your phone, inbox or other apps on its own; the steps above cover that.

Each morning, go through the [Company] inbox.

1. File every email into one folder: [Bids], [Invoices], [Timesheets], [Clients], [Suppliers]. Move obvious junk and marketing to [Junk]. Never delete anything from a client or supplier.
2. For each new bid invite, add a row to [Bid board]: project, who sent it, due date, link.
3. For each supplier invoice, log supplier, amount, due date and job number in [Invoice log]. Flag any you can't match to a job.
4. Don't pay, reply to or delete anything else.

End with a short log: how many emails went into each folder, and anything you weren't sure about.

What you should get back: A morning log like: '212 emails filed, 41 junk, 6 bid invites added to the board, 8 invoices logged, 2 couldn't be matched to a job.'

Written by Quickly and Good, inspired by this case.