In Part 1, I told you about a business owner who caught one of his team members pasting client quotes into free ChatGPT.
Six months of it.
I also said the answer isn’t a ban. It’s giving your team something better than their personal workaround.
I have a thesis on this:
Your business already has a “way of doing things”. It’s just that it lives in people’s heads.
Get it out of their heads and into something the whole team can use, and you’ve built an asset.
Leave it in their heads, and you’ve built a dependency.
Right now I’m building one of these for a client in the construction industry. So rather than talk in theory, let me show you the real thing.
Real-World Example of An AI Plugin Inside Claude Cowork
I’ll keep them anonymous. But here’s the shape of the business.
Construction. They price and deliver building services work. Tenders come in from main contractors. Big packs of drawings, specifications, requirements. Sometimes fifty or sixty documents in a single pack.
Their job is to turn that pack into a priced tender return. Fast, accurate, and without missing anything that will bite them later on site.
Now, they’d been doing this for years. They’re good at it.
The problem was how someone did it, not the output.
One person split out the drawings. Another got the supplier quote. The estimator had a spreadsheet nobody else dared touch. The team changed the numbers on last month’s tender return document, making it a copy.
Sound familiar?
That’s the “eight personal ways” problem from Part 1. Except in this case, if the estimator went on holiday, the tenders stopped.
So we built them a Claude Cowork AI plugin. Four stages. Their process, packaged.
Let’s run through it.
#1 – Tender Triage
A tender pack lands. Sixty PDFs in a folder. Some are single drawings. Some are one PDF with forty drawings inside it. Nothing’s named sensibly.
Before we did anything, someone had to sit and go through the lot. Open each one, work out which trade it belonged to, split it out, file it somewhere sensible, and pull any schedules into a spreadsheet by hand.
Half a day. Sometimes a full one.
Now they say “triage this tender”.
The plugin opens every drawing, works out what it is — mechanical, electrical, public health, whatever, and puts it in front of a human to confirm.
Then it splits every drawing into its own file, sorts them into trade folders, and pulls the schedules out into spreadsheets.
Half a day becomes twenty minutes. And most of that twenty minutes is a person checking the plugin’s homework.
The Bit That Matters
Notice what didn’t happen there.
Nobody wrote a prompt.
Nobody explained what a mechanical drawing looks like.
And nobody told it where the folders go.
All of that was packaged in advance. That’s the AI plugin. The “how we do it here” is already loaded.
#2 – Supplier Enquiries
Once the pack’s sorted, the next job is getting prices from specialist suppliers. Fire alarms, ductwork, controls, whatever the job needs.
That means an email per trade. With the right drawings attached. To the right supplier. Asking for the right thing.
Before, this was one person’s job. She knew who to send what to. She had a rough template. And she’d spend an afternoon building emails and attaching PDFs.
Now the plugin reads the triage output, checks their supplier list, and drafts every enquiry email with the correct drawings already attached.
Drafts. Not sent.
They sit in Outlook waiting for a human to read them and hit send. Because there’s no world where I let a plugin email your suppliers without someone looking first.
An afternoon becomes half an hour of reading and pressing send.
Stabilisers On
I get asked a lot: “what if it sends something stupid?”
It can’t. It’s not allowed to send anything.
The build has a rule that I baked in. Anything that leaves the business. An email, a document, a price, gets a human’s eyes on it first. Every time.
Speed is nice. Control is the point.
#3 – Estimating
This is where the fear lived.
The estimator’s spreadsheet. Years of rates, labour calculations, mark-ups and tabs that referenced other tabs. Brilliant bit of work. And if he got hit by a bus, the business was in serious trouble.
I’ve seen this before, by the way. In my first coding job, we had a payment screen in the sales system that nobody would touch. Everyone was shit scared of breaking it. Same thing, different spreadsheet.
So we didn’t replace his spreadsheet. We taught the plugin how to use it.
His rules — labour always comes from the rates tab, never typed in. Overhead and profit spread across every client line at a set percentage. Every trade total carries into the summary. We draft clarifications for anything the drawings don’t answer.
All of that is now written down and packaged. The plugin fills the estimator the way he fills it. And it validates the brief first, so if a tender’s missing key information, it says so before anyone prices anything.
Turning A Person Into A Process
Here’s what changed.
Before, the estimate was only as good as the estimator having a good day.
Now, the newest person in the office can run “generate the estimate” and get the same structure, the same rules and the same checks as the bloke who built the spreadsheet.
He’s still the expert. He still reviews it. But he’s no longer the bottleneck. And when he’s on a beach in Tenerife, tenders still get priced.
That’s the difference between knowledge you rent and knowledge you own.
#4 – The Tender Return
Last stage. Turning a finished estimate into the document the client actually receives.
This used to be “open last month’s Word doc and change the numbers”. Which works right up until someone forgets to change one number, and you’ve submitted a price with another job’s figure in it.
Now the plugin runs pre-flight checks on the estimate: is the brief complete, do the totals reconcile, are the clarifications written. And then builds the return document from the workbook’s own figures.
Only from the workbook. It can’t make a number up.
If a check fails, it stops and tells you why. It doesn’t produce a document with a hole in it.
Like A Christmas Card List
I’ll explain how this works the way I’d explain it to a non-technical mate in the pub.
Sending Christmas cards. You write pretty much the same card to everyone. The only thing that changes is the name at the top and maybe a line about their year.
The plugin does that with your tender return. Same structure, same format, same standards, every time. What changes is the numbers and the job details. And it pulls those from a place you trust, rather than someone’s memory.
Nobody would say Christmas cards are complicated. Neither is this.
What’s Actually Inside The AI Plugin
Quick bit of plain English on what an AI plugin is, because I’ve used the word a lot.
A Cowork plugin bundles a few things together.
Skills — written instructions on how to do a task your way.
Commands — the one-liners your team types, like “triage this tender”.
Connectors — the links to your real tools. This one talks to their Dropbox, where the tender packs live, and their automation server for the bits that run on their own.
And here’s the part I love. It’s all files. Written instructions. No code.
Twenty years ago I’d have built this as a piece of software with a six-figure price tag. Now the “code” is a set of documents describing how the business works. Which means when the business changes, you change the documents. Not the software.
The Before And After
Let’s be honest about numbers. It’s early days, and I don’t do made-up case studies.
But there’s a pattern that’s emerging
Triage: half a day to twenty minutes.
Supplier enquiries: an afternoon to half an hour.
Estimating: same quality, no longer dependent on one person.
Tender return: no more “last month’s doc with the numbers changed”.
Add it up and a tender that took the best part of two days of scattered effort now takes an afternoon. Same people. Same standards. More tenders out the door.
But the number I care about most isn’t hours. It’s the one that doesn’t fit on a spreadsheet.
The business now has its tender process written down, packaged, and available to anyone on the team. If the estimator leaves, the process doesn’t leave with him.
That’s the asset.
Conclusion: What A Company AI Plugin Actually Looks Like
Strip the construction industry out of this and here’s what you’ve got.
A business had a process that lived in a few people’s heads. We got it out, wrote it down, and packaged it so the whole team could use it. Four stages:
- Triage — sort what’s come in, the company way
- Enquiries — draft what goes out, with a human on the send button
- Estimating — the expert’s rules, run by anyone
- The return — built from trusted numbers, checked before it leaves
Now swap “tender” for whatever your equivalent is. Your quoting, onboarding, job handover and your complaint handling.
The shape is identical. Something comes in, gets sorted, gets worked, goes out. And right now it depends on who’s in that day.
Part 3 takes this up a level. One AI plugin is a process. A whole menu of them is your organisation’s own marketplace, an approved way of working for every part of the business. That’s where this stops being a productivity win and starts being a business asset.
I hope this helps.
Oh, just one more thing. If you’re reading this and thinking, “I’ve no idea which of my processes I’d even start with”
That’s exactly what the AI & Automation Readiness Report is for. Five minutes, and it shows you where your business is most dependent on what’s stuck in people’s heads.
