Since May we've shipped over 200 releases of Emily, a voice assistant that sits on top of a company's ERP. Reps call her or message her on WhatsApp, ask a question in plain language, and she answers from live data. She drafts the email, books the meeting, logs the visit note. Nothing leaves without a human yes.
When you build something like this, you start with a list of clever features. Then real people use it and the list rewrites itself. Here's what survived.
The number one use is boring, and that's the point. 'What does this customer owe?' 'What did they buy last month?' 'Is it in stock?' These are questions a rep used to answer by phoning the office or digging through ERP screens on a laptop in a car park. Answering them in five seconds, by voice, is the whole product for most people.
The second is getting information in, not out. Dictating a visit note or an order on the way to the next customer, and having it land as a draft in the right place, beats any dashboard. Pilots measured 75% less ERP admin per visit, and the bulk of that came from here.
Third: briefings. Before a visit, Emily pulls the calendar, the inbox and the ERP into one short summary. Nobody asked for it on day one. Now it's one of the things people would miss most.
What didn't matter as much as we expected: open-ended chat. People don't want to talk to their ERP. They want an answer and to get on with their day. Every release that made answers shorter, faster and more reliable did more than any release that made Emily more conversational.
The other lesson is about trust. A rep stops using an assistant the first time it confidently says something wrong. So most of those 200 releases aren't features. They're things like 'a notice when your ERP can't be reached' and 'answers no longer go missing during updates'. Reliability is the feature.
If your team spends their day moving information between people and systems, that's the sign. Not 'should we add AI', but 'what job does someone do over and over that a system could do for them'. That's where it pays for itself, every day.
If that sounds like your business, tell us what takes your team too long and we'll send a fixed quote within a day. Or see Emily: duckbyte.co/work/emily