Google Calendar
Looks like your supplier call clashes with school pickup. Want me to move it to 4pm?
Drafted: reschedule and reply
4 waiting · sample data, nothing is sent
The Build Lab · Case study · Admin
A tiny elephant watching the inbox, diary, invoices and stock, drafting the next job for you.
A small shop owner checks five apps a day to find out what needs them.
A desk assistant that watches Gmail, Calendar, Xero and Shopify, spots what needs you and drafts the reply, reschedule, chaser or reorder for you to approve.
Checking five apps a day to see what needs you.
Small product businesses and service owners who check four or five apps a day just to find out what needs them.
Fewer apps to check, fewer things slipping through, and admin that is mostly a tap to approve.
Demo video
Live demo
Everything below works. The business and data are made up; the real version is built around your business and your tools.
Handled today
| Product | Sold 7d | Available |
|---|---|---|
| Fig & Cedar300g amber jar · WR-FC-300 | 41 | +48 Tue Low 4 |
| Linen Wash180g travel tin · WR-LW-180 | 18 | Low 9 |
| Smoked Oud300g amber jar · WR-SO-300 | 23 | 21 |
| Hearth, Cedar & Clove300g amber jar · WR-HC-300 | 19 | 17 |
| Salt & Driftwood300g amber jar · WR-SD-300 | 12 | 52 |
| Number | To | Amount | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| INV-0418 | Mossy & Co | 486.00 | Overdue Reminder sent |
| INV-0421 | The Botanist Bath | 312.50 | Awaiting |
| INV-0422 | Hearth & Home Ltd | 1,140.00 | Awaiting |
| INV-0423 | Stable Yard Market | 264.00 | Awaiting |
| INV-0419 | Little Fern Florist | 198.00 | Paid |
Google Calendar
Looks like your supplier call clashes with school pickup. Want me to move it to 4pm?
Drafted: reschedule and reply
4 waiting · sample data, nothing is sent
How I built this
I built Nelly with Claude as a quiet menu bar assistant rather than another app to check. The desktop, windows and notification panel are plain HTML, CSS and a little JavaScript for the event queue and the approvals.
Everything here is sample data for a made-up shop. In a real setup she connects to Gmail, Google Calendar, Xero and Shopify through their official connectors and APIs, and watches for the same kind of moments: a customer chasing an order, a diary clash, an invoice gone quiet, stock running low.
The important bit is the approval step. She drafts the reply, the reschedule, the chaser or the reorder, and you decide what goes. The time saved figure is an illustrative estimate, not a measurement.
Questions
An AI desk assistant is a helper that watches the apps you check every day and tells you what needs you. In the demo, Nelly watches Gmail, Google Calendar, Xero and Shopify for a small candle business. She spots things like a diary clash, a customer asking about an order, low stock or an overdue invoice, then drafts the fix: a reply, a new meeting time, a reorder or a polite chaser. The owner approves or skips each one. Nothing is sent or changed without a yes.
By doing the checking and the first draft, so you only make decisions. The daily admin in a small shop is mostly the same handful of jobs: answering where-is-my-order emails, chasing unpaid invoices, reordering stock and moving appointments. AI can spot each of those in your inbox, accounts and shop, then draft the response for you to approve. You can start without any automation by pasting a customer email into Claude and asking for a reply in your tone. Connect the apps once you know which jobs come up most.
The demo connects Gmail, Google Calendar, Xero and Shopify. Claude has built-in connectors for Gmail, Google Calendar and Google Drive, so reading your inbox and diary is possible without extra tools. Accounts and shop platforms such as Xero, FreeAgent, Shopify, WooCommerce, Etsy and Square usually connect through Zapier, Make, or a small custom build using their APIs. Outlook and Microsoft 365 work too. The cheapest start is to connect only the one app that eats most of your time.
A basic version can run on Claude Pro, which is around £20 a month, using its built-in connectors to read Gmail and Calendar and draft replies. Adding accounts and shop data usually needs Zapier or Make. Both have free plans for light use, with paid tiers depending on volume. A fully custom assistant like the demo, watching several apps in the background, is a bigger build and depends on how many apps and actions are involved. Setup usually takes days for a simple version and a few weeks for the full thing.
It can be, if you keep permissions tight and approvals on. Connect only the accounts it needs and use read-only access where you can, for example reading Xero invoices without being able to create payments. Keep every send, reschedule and order waiting for your approval, and keep a log of what the assistant did. Your inbox holds customers' personal data under UK GDPR, so use business accounts and tools with proper data processing agreements. Never give an assistant the power to move money.
Not unless you choose to let it. In the demo every reply, chaser and reorder is a draft that waits for you to approve or skip. Some owners later let low-risk jobs go without approval, such as a standard order-status reply, once they have seen the drafts are reliably right. Start with everything on approval for at least a few weeks. The time saved comes from not having to check five apps and write each reply from scratch, not from skipping the final glance.
Yes. My 1:1 AI implementation is done-with-you support over six weeks: we build your assistant together around the tools you already use, so you understand every step and can keep it running without me. It is not a done-for-you service, and it suits people who want to learn the skill rather than hand it off. If you would rather go it alone, the answers on this page are enough to get a first version working, and starting small is the right call either way.