# We Run Kaizen on AI > Source: > Published: 2026-09-24 03:08:51+00:00 Case study ยท Our own company # How we run Kaizen on AI An AI agent does the routine work of running our company. It sorts email, writes up meetings, reads contractor invoices, drafts client invoices, follows up on late work and reviews new federal awards. It prepares the work, and a person approves anything that leaves the company. We build the same kind of system for clients, so this page shows what it does and the rules it follows. - In use since - 2025 - Email sorted - Every 5 minutes - Email, invoices and messages - Sent only after a person approves - Raw meeting transcripts - Deleted within 24 hours ## The rules it follows Most of the work is done by scheduled jobs: one for email, one for meetings, one for invoices, and so on. Those jobs only record what they find. One agent reads their findings and decides what happens next. That separation is the most important design decision in the system. - One agent decides what interrupts a person - It interrupts for four things only: a deadline today or tomorrow that nobody has seen, something broken that blocks the team, a person waiting on a same-day decision, and an urgent request from a client. Everything else waits for the next briefing. - Nothing leaves the company without a person - The agent has no tool that sends email or messages. It writes a draft, and the draft goes out only when a person taps Send. Invoices and payments work the same way. - Every alert opens a work item - A phone alert links to the record behind it, so the person can act at once. A repeat alert about the same item waits at least six hours, unless the facts have changed. - No news means no message - Jobs do not send "all clear" messages. The afternoon briefing is skipped when nothing has changed since the morning. - Each person sees only their own records - Contractors use the same agent through Slack, but it works with their permissions and their records only. A message from someone it does not recognize gets no answer. - Every run is recorded - Each run records its steps and its result. When a job fails, the failure becomes a work item, so no job can stop without someone knowing. ## A working day All day, email is sorted every five minutes, the agent checks for anything urgent every fifteen minutes, and meeting notes are written as each recording finishes. On top of that, a weekday runs like this. - 6:00 am - Meeting preparation - A short brief for each meeting on the day's calendar, with background on anyone new. - 6:30 am - Day plan - Up to three proposed priorities and calendar blocks. The founder accepts or declines each one. - 7:00 am - Renewals and purchase orders - Contracts, insurance policies and certificates due in the next 60 days, and purchase orders close to their limit. - 8:00 am - New opportunities - New National Science Foundation awards and Virginia technology solicitations, each assessed for fit. For a strong match, it drafts a first message for a person to send. - 9:00 am - Morning briefing - Everything that waited overnight, with each item checked again against its record. - 10:00 am - Follow-up on waiting items - When someone has not replied for three business days, it drafts a polite reminder. At most three a day, and never two to the same thread within a week. - 12:00 pm - Contractor invoices - Invoices are read from email and checked against logged time, the agreed rate and the billing period. - 1:00 pm - Afternoon briefing - Only when something changed since the morning. Otherwise it is skipped. - 6:15 pm - Day recap - What was done, what moved, and what is waiting for tomorrow. ## What it does, by area - Fixed rules sort most mail, and AI sorts the rest. Routine mail is archived, mail that is only for information is summarized, and the rest stays in the inbox. When a client asks to schedule a meeting, an alert goes out on the next triage run, with no AI step in between. Triage runs every five minutes on weekdays, 8:30 am to 6:30 pm. Replies to routine mail are drafted for approval. - Meetings - Within minutes of a recording ending, the meeting has a summary and a list of action items, without duplicates and linked to existing tickets. New tickets are suggested for a person to accept. The raw transcript is deleted when the summary is saved, and after 24 hours at the latest. - Invoices and payments - A contractor bill that matches logged time within one dollar waits for the payment run every other Friday, and a person confirms that run. A bill that does not match goes to a person first. Client invoices are drafted on the first of each month. A person approves the invoice, then approves sending it, in two separate steps. - Projects and follow-up - Tasks with a due date are tracked automatically. When a flexible date slips once, the owner gets a reminder two business days later and the manager is not told. A second slip, or any slip on a client deadline, goes to the manager at once. Twice a week, each person's list is drafted as a message that the manager approves before it is sent. - Contracts and documents - Contracts, insurance policies and certificates are checked for renewal dates. Scanned paper documents are read, sorted and filed. - New business - New National Science Foundation awards and Virginia technology solicitations are assessed every weekday. A person decides whether to reach out, and a person sends the message. - This website - Search and traffic data is collected every day and reviewed every week. The agent may publish at most one article a week on this site. Each one passes an independent review of its claims, the same build, link and accessibility checks as every other page, and a check of the live page. A failed release is rolled back. Social media posts stay as drafts. - Software work - Small coding tasks can be assigned to the agent. It works only in approved code repositories, and its work ends as a change for an engineer to review. It never marks its own task as done. - Company knowledge - Our internal reference library is checked one section at a time, every night, and errors are corrected. Email and meeting notes add to it as they arrive. ## What we changed along the way **We started with a separate agent for each specialty.** Each one could interrupt us on its own. Each alert made sense by itself, but together they were noise. Now one agent decides what reaches a person, and the specialists became scheduled jobs. [We wrote up that change.](https://kznconsulting.com/writing/cut-thirteen-alerting-agents-to-one) **We changed the software the agent runs on twice.** Each job's instructions are kept in plain text files, separate from the software. On the second move, every job moved in one day. **We made alerts point at work.** An alert that only says something happened makes a person go looking. An alert that opens the work item, with its owner, date and history, can be acted on straight away. ## What this means for your project Most of these jobs are common to any organization: an inbox, invoices, meeting notes, follow-up and reporting. The rules above took us the longest to get right, and they are what we bring to each client project: one place that decides what interrupts people, drafts that wait for a person, and a record of every run. If you have work like this, the [AI Workflow Review](https://kznconsulting.com/services/ai-implementation) prices two or three of your workflows in two weeks and tells you which to build first. ## Keep reading - Writing ### How we cut ten alerting agents down to oneWhy one agent now decides what interrupts a person, and the rules we wrote for it. - Writing ### How to automate follow-up when deadlines slipRecord where each date came from, check the current status before a reminder, and send only real problems to a manager. - Service ### AI for the work your staff still do by handHow we build systems like this one for clients, and the two fixed-price reviews to start with. ## Want the same for your organization? Bring two or three workflows to a 30-minute call. We will tell you which one is worth building first. [Book a 30-minute call](https://kznconsulting.com/contact)