The brief from the firm was short. Partners were running back-to-back client meetings, the write-up was happening at nine in the evening if it happened at all, and the things clients said in those meetings ("we're thinking about buying the building", "my daughter's joining the business", "the van lease is up in March") were not making it anywhere a person would act on them. Follow-up was a memory test.
What we built was meeting-intelligence software. Each client call is recorded with consent, transcribed, and turned into a structured record: a summary, the actions for the firm and for the client, and a read on three things a partner cares about but rarely has time to log: the opportunities raised, the risks mentioned, and the client's sentiment. It files against the client and drafts the follow-up email for the partner to send. The build was £7,500 as a one-off, and two further builds followed because once the firm could see the data, it wanted more of it.
What "meeting intelligence" means in a practice, specifically
The phrase gets used loosely. In this build it meant five outputs from every meeting, produced within minutes of the call ending:
- A summary a partner would be happy to have written, in the firm's register, not a generic bullet dump.
- Actions, split by owner. What the firm said it would do, what the client said they would send, each with a date where one was mentioned.
- Opportunities. Anything said that could become advisory work: a disposal, an acquisition, a succession question, a tax planning window. Each one tagged to the client and surfaced in a weekly list.
- Risks. Cash-flow warnings, a dispute, a compliance deadline the client seemed unaware of. The things a firm wants to have on record that it raised.
- Sentiment. A simple read on how the client sounded. Not a score to obsess over; a flag so a partner notices a client who has gone quiet or cold before the engagement letter comes up for renewal.
The follow-up email is drafted from the actions and sent only when the partner presses send. That one rule, drafted for a person rather than sent by a machine, is what makes the system acceptable to a regulated firm and is the model the ICAEW's generative AI guidance describes.
What the firm found once it could see the data
The first thing was volume. Partners were not aware of how many advisory openings came up in ordinary compliance meetings until they were listed. The second was the gap between what was said and what was done: actions promised to clients that nobody had been tracking. The third was the time. The write-up had been eating an hour a day per partner, and that hour moved back into the day because the summary now arrived before they had reached the car park.
None of this is specific to that firm. It is the normal state of a practice where meetings are frequent and the follow-up depends on the busiest people remembering.
How to scope one for your practice
Four questions decide the build:
- Where do meetings happen? Teams, Zoom, Google Meet, phone, in person. Each has a different capture route. Video calls are straightforward; in-person meetings need a recorder and a consent routine.
- Where should the record live? The practice management system (Karbon, Senta, TaxCalc Practice), the CRM, or a shared drive. The system writes to one place of record, and the partners read it there, not in another inbox.
- Who approves what goes to the client? Always a person. The question is which person and how they are notified.
- What should be surfaced weekly? Opportunities and overdue actions, across all clients, to whoever runs business development. This list is the point of the build.
Consent is simple to get right and easy to forget: the client is told the meeting is recorded and summarised by software, the recording is kept only as long as the firm's retention policy says, and the summary is reviewed by a person before anything is acted on. A short line in the engagement letter and a sentence at the start of each call covers it.
What it costs, and how long
The firm's build was £7,500. A practice with a simpler setup (one meeting platform, one system of record) comes in lower; one that wants the opportunity list wired into a CRM pipeline and the partners' daily brief comes in higher. Two to four weeks from scoping to the first real meeting going through it. The accountancy practices page sets out the pricing ladder and the compliance detail, and if you would rather have the whole practice mapped first, that is the Scaleability Audit.
Founder, Anco AI. Builds the systems this site talks about, and runs his own business on them.
