The SergeBot pilot: one real workflow, live in your own tools

Who the pilot is for

The pilot is for small businesses and corporations that have one job eating hours every week and want it fixed properly, not studied.

• You have one path that hurts. It repeats every week, starts from a clear event, and still drops balls when someone is out.
• You want to keep your tools. Your CRM, inbox, calendar and invoicing stay in place. The pilot connects them.
• You can name an owner. Someone on your side will own exceptions after go live.
• You would rather see one thing work than plan ten. Phase two is earned, not scheduled.

It is not the right fit if you want a company wide AI strategy first, a software seat rollout, or a replacement for your core systems. We will say so on the discovery call.

Good first paths

The best first pilot repeats every week, starts from a clear event, and ends in a predictable result. If a trained person would do the same steps every time, it is a candidate. If the next step is reading the room, it is not.

• Client intake. A form or inquiry creates the record, tags the source and pings the right owner with the details filled in.
• Quote follow-up. A sent quote gets a timed follow-up that stops the moment the client replies.
• Appointment reminders. A booked slot triggers reminders and a reschedule path without anyone watching the calendar.
• Job closeout. A job marked complete sends the wrap-up, files the paperwork and starts the invoice.
• Invoice follow-up. An overdue invoice starts a polite sequence that stops when it is paid.
• Approvals and inbox triage. Requests and inbound messages get sorted to a named owner, with anything unclear handed to a person.

The process that happens twice a year is not a good pilot, no matter how strategic it feels. You also do not need clean data to start: messy data is not a reason to wait.

What the pilot includes

The pilot is not a new app your team has to log into every morning. It is the connection layer between the tools you already pay for, built around one path.

• One owned workflow, mapped from a real week of how the job gets done, including the ugly exceptions people usually skip.
• A trigger, such as a status change, a form, a payment, a date or an inbound email, so the work starts without someone remembering.
• The middle steps: create the record, send the message, make the folder, book the slot, write the field.
• Stop conditions: they replied, they paid, they complained, the amount is blank. If an AI step is in the path, it gets a written stop list too.
• A failure path, so if a step dies, a named person gets the record with enough context to fix it once.
• A test pass on real examples before go live, including the cases that break polite demos.
• A plain handoff: what is live, what is still manual, and who owns exceptions after we step back.

What the pilot leaves out

Saying no is part of the product. The pilot does not include:

• Replacing your CRM, accounting software or other core systems.
• A company wide AI strategy or multi department roadmap before the first path runs.
• Several half finished automations stacked on top of each other.
• A chatbot or voice assistant, unless that is the specific workflow you asked us to build.
• AI experiments with no system of record and nobody responsible when they fail.
• Long slide decks, requirements documents nobody reads, or a quarter of workshops before anything fires.

How the pilot runs, week by week

Before kickoff

1. Discovery call. In 30 minutes you walk us through one workflow as it ran last week. You leave with a straight answer on whether it is worth automating and a rough picture of the build.
2. Scope in writing. If it makes sense to work together, the proposal names the trigger, the systems, the stop conditions, the failure owner and what done looks like. You decide with full information.

The 2 to 6 week build

• Days 1 to 3: map the path. Walk through last week's version of the job. Name the systems, the exceptions and the person who owns failures after go live.
• Weeks 1 to 2: build. The trigger, the middle steps, the stops and the failure ping, built in your tools. Scope stays at one workflow.
• Weeks 2 to 4: test. Run it on real examples, including the ugly ones. Fix the seams. Confirm people only see the exceptions that need them.
• Weeks 4 to 6: go live and hand off. Watch the first real cycles, hand off the documentation, and decide together whether a second path has been earned.

Simpler single system paths often finish closer to two weeks. Handoffs across several tools with messy exceptions land closer to six. If access stalls or nobody can name an exception owner, the clock pauses until that is sorted, because building from a vague story builds the wrong thing.

What we need from you

Three things, not a requirements document:

1. The painful path, in order, including the exceptions.
2. Access to, or a walkthrough of, the tools that path already uses.
3. The name of the person who will own exceptions after go live.

What you get at handoff

At the end of the pilot you get a working path and a plain record of it, so nothing lives only in one person's head.

• The live workflow, running in your own accounts and tools.
• A plain write up of what is running, what is still manual, and where each step lives.
• The exception owner and the failure path, written down, so everyone knows who gets pinged and what they see.
• The stop conditions and test cases we used, so changes later start from the same standard.
• A short walkthrough with the person who owns the path day to day.

Done is not a dashboard nobody opens. Done means the event happens and the sequence runs without anyone remembering, people only see the exceptions that need their judgment, and you can tell a new hire what is live without digging through a private folder.

What happens after the pilot

Once the first path runs on its own, there are three honest options, and you choose.

• Own it yourselves. The handoff is written so your team can run the path without us.
• Add a monthly plan. If you want a named owner on our side, a monthly plan can cover monitoring of the live automation, small updates and a short monthly report. The plans are described on the services page.
• Pick the next path. If the first one earned its keep, we scope a second workflow the same way: in writing, before any build.

If the first path does not earn its keep, we do not invent a second project to hide it. We stop, rethink the problem, or walk away.

Who you work with

SergeBot is a small studio based in Toronto, serving clients worldwide. You work directly with Karim Ragab, SergeBot's founder, from the discovery call through handoff.

Want the longer read first? See what a scoped AI automation pilot includes, what a first build looks like and what happens on a discovery call. For everything else we build, go back to all SergeBot services.