In short
- Every client conversation writes itself to the right client folder: transcribed, analysed, summarised.
- The weekly status meeting became an email you reply to with a single letter.
- The machine remembers and routes; the judgement stays with the human.
First on ourselves
An agency that helps others adopt AI should be the most AI-native place it knows. Otherwise you're selling something you don't do yourself. So we made our own operation the testbed. Not with a grand plan, but by picking one thing at a time that we did by hand every week, and setting it up properly once.
The chain from conversation to memory
Every client conversation we have is recorded and transcribed. Then a series of agents takes over. The first determines what kind of conversation it was (sales, discovery, an internal session) and puts the transcript in the right place. The second analyses it and pulls out the action points and decisions. The third updates that client's context: what is at play, which loops are still open, who is involved. Nobody types that out anymore. When I open a client folder on Monday, the state of play is already there, built from last week's conversations.
The machine remembers and routes. The human decides.
The Monday without a status meeting
Most agencies hold a weekly meeting to catch up on who is doing what. For us, an email does that. Every Monday morning each team member gets, per client, only what needs a decision: open questions, tasks running this week, deals that have stalled. You reply with a single letter on a line, and that patches the administration within fifteen minutes. The email isn't a report to read, it's a work list to respond to.
What keeps itself up to date
Email contact with clients logs itself into a timeline per client, so you see at a glance when you last spoke to someone. External developments around our active clients are gathered weekly. And when one of our own systems breaks at night, an agent writes a proposal for the fix itself, tests it, and puts it ready. We only have to say yes or no. The machine repairs nothing irreversible without a human signing off.
What we deliberately did not automate
None of these agents takes over a judgement. They remove the retyping, the chasing of a status, the endless rebuilding of context. The thinking (what does this mean for this client, what is the next step) stays with us. That is the line we hold everywhere: the machine remembers and routes, the human decides. Anything touching money, a contract, or the outside world keeps a human hand on it.
It took building, not buying
There is no tool you buy that does this. It is assembled from separate pieces, each small enough to make in a week, each aimed at one recurring action. That is exactly the lesson we take to clients. Becoming AI-ready rarely starts with a purchase. It starts with the question of which piece of work you do again every week, and whether that work is worth designing properly once.
Why we dare to say this
That adoption is a design question and not a knowledge question is easy to claim. We believe it because we redesigned our own work that way. The tools we showed in a keynote now run in our own Monday. If you want to know what AI does to an organisation, the most honest answer is: come see what it did to ours.
Ruben Horbach
Co-founder · Back From the Future
Ruben researches how organisations adopt AI meaningfully — not as technology, but as a change in work and people. He builds the agent infrastructure behind BFF and speaks about the near future of work.
