Client portal · storyboard presentation
From inquiry to human-gated AI
A fictional engagement journey through the ordered phases in the client portal feature roadmap. Use the arrow keys to move through the story or press O for slide overview.
The feature sequence
Build the human workflow before automating it.
Alex asks for help without creating an account.
The public website collects enough context for an initial fit review. The submission creates only a private inquiry and staff review context.
Public content is untrusted and cannot qualify a prospect, provision a tenant, or trigger an invitation.
Alex knows the inquiry arrived—and nothing more.
The acknowledgment is prompt but deliberately avoids promising acceptance, a response time, or portal access.
The later portal invitation should feel intentionally prepared, not automatically generated by a form.
AI prepares the review; Todd makes the decision.
Submitted facts, AI inferences, missing information, and suggested discovery questions appear together. Todd can follow up, decline, or qualify the inquiry.
AI cannot qualify, decline, contact the prospect, provision a workspace, or invite a client.
Todd prepares the workspace before inviting Alex.
Qualification, workspace preparation, invitation sending, and membership activation remain separate, attributable steps.
The prepared workspace is not client-visible. Only accepting the staff-issued invitation activates membership.
Alex follows a staff-issued invitation.
Authentication establishes who Alex is. The invitation and active organization membership—not sign-in alone—determine what Alex may see.
Provides the secure identity and tenant boundary required by every later phase.
Alex arrives in one tenant-scoped workspace.
The existing engagement summary establishes context but does not yet provide a collaboration loop.
The next useful capability is shared conversation and activity around this engagement.
Todd and Alex preserve the commercial discussion.
Client-visible messages and append-only activity create one ordered context. Staff-only notes remain a separately authorized future slice.
Whether the shared timeline reduces email, repeated questions, and context transfer.
Todd publishes a proposal version for review.
Alex’s decision attaches to exactly version 2. A change request can lead to version 3, but approval never transfers forward.
Proposal publication and review decisions become activity in the same engagement timeline.
Business approval stays distinct from legal signing.
The portal records review of the displayed agreement. A selected provider owns the legal ceremony, evidence, and completed record.
Custom software preserves context; it does not recreate a signature provider.
A deposit observation moves work into delivery.
Stripe remains the financial record. The portal captures only the useful milestone, then records that delivery conversation moved to Slack.
Measure whether manual references are enough before adding webhook and reconciliation complexity.
AI assists only after the human workflow is understood.
The model produces a private attributed draft. Todd reviews, edits, and separately chooses whether anything becomes client-visible.
Track edit distance, acceptance, time saved, failures, latency, tokens, and cost.
Recommended next decision
Begin with Phase 1.
Plan a bounded inquiry-to-invitation slice: durable intake, neutral acknowledgment, staff review states, consultant qualification, retry-safe workspace preparation, and deliberate invitation. Add the private AI briefing only after the human path is proven or as an isolated staff-only experiment.