The practice that stopped losing evenings to enquiry admin
How an architecture practice added a Kelpie robot to qualify new project enquiries, tame sprawling consultant threads, and hand the directors back their billable hours.
Challenge
The directors were the bottleneck, and the most expensive people to have stuck on admin. New project enquiries arrived steadily, but many were never the right fit: budgets that did not match the scope, sites outside the practice's wheelhouse, or timelines that did not work. Live projects also generated endless consultant coordination, builder RFIs, council back-and-forth, and loose deadlines that usually landed with the directors at 9pm.
Solution
Kelpie deployed a dedicated AI robot running on the practice's own private server, reachable by the team on Telegram. When a new enquiry comes in, the robot asks smart qualifying questions about scope, site, budget range, and timeline, drafts a warm first reply, and flags whether it is a right-fit lead before a director spends a minute on it. For live projects, it summarises long consultant and RFI threads, tracks what is outstanding, and surfaces due items each morning.
Robot handles
- Qualifying and first replying to new project enquiries
- Screening right-fit vs wrong-fit leads
- Summarising consultant and RFI threads
- Tracking outstanding items and deadlines
- Drafting file notes and meeting summaries
Results
- Every enquiry answered same day, 24/7
- Good prospects no longer go cold waiting
- Only right-fit enquiries reach the directors
- Mismatched enquiries are handled politely up front
- RFIs, consultant items, and deadlines stay visible
“We were spending our evenings replying to enquiries that were never going to be the right fit, and still missing things on the projects that mattered. Now the robot does the first pass on everything, we only step in where our judgement actually earns its keep.”
Director, architecture practice
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