AI Automation – What It Looks Like in Practice

November 13, 2025

AI Automation – What It Looks Like in Practice

For years, “AI automation” has been a buzzword thrown around at conferences and across social feeds. But what does it actually look like in day-to-day professional practice—especially for accountants, tax advisors, lawyers and financial planners who depend on clients completing tasks on time?

At MyDocSafe, we’ve been building the answer.

AI automation isn’t just about generating text or offering chatbot support. In professional services, true automation is about making sure clients complete the entire onboarding journey—even when the process spans multiple systems, external portals, and government websites. And that’s where MyDocSafe’s client portals, combined with AI assistants from Ai4U.digital, create a major leap forward.

The Reality: Onboarding Requires Clients to Jump Across Multiple Systems

Think about a typical onboarding or compliance process:
Even the simplest engagement often involves multiple steps that your clients need to complete outside your immediate control.

Examples include:

  • Completing identity verification on a government website
  • Generating or downloading tax documents
  • Applying for agent authorisation codes
  • Accessing online banking or payroll portals
  • Uploading files from third-party software
  • Reviewing information scattered across emails

Each step may require its own login, PIN, security question, or two-factor authentication. And each step is a potential failure point.

This is where things traditionally fall apart:

  • Clients forget what they need to do
  • Tasks “slip through the cracks”
  • You chase them with emails and calls
  • You manually check whether they completed each step
  • You spend time troubleshooting small issues

It’s slow, frustrating, and costly.

Where MyDocSafe Changes the Game

MyDocSafe client portals bring all onboarding tasks into one unified, guided experience. But the real transformation happens when the portal includes an AI assistant that orchestrates the client journey across all required systems—including external ones you don’t control.

Here’s what it looks like in practice:

1. The Portal Invitation That Does More Than Just “Invite”

When you invite a client to a MyDocSafe portal, you can now include an AI-powered guide that instantly understands:

  • Who the client is
  • What engagement they are completing
  • What information is required
  • Which external systems must be accessed

Rather than sending a long instruction email (“please log into HMRC… then download…”), the AI assistant becomes a personal onboarding concierge.

2. AI-Guided Tasks That Span Multiple Software Suites

Within the portal workflow, the AI can:

  • Tell the client exactly what to do on a government site
  • Explain where to click, how to authenticate, and what reference numbers to retrieve
  • Record progress (“Client has obtained their HMRC authorisation code”)
  • Prompt for uploads (“Please upload the PDF you downloaded from the Companies House website”)
  • Ask clarifying questions to prevent mistakes
  • Offer real-time help if the client gets stuck

This eliminates the guesswork that traditionally requires phone calls, screen-sharing sessions, or long back-and-forth email chains.

3. Automated Follow-Ups and Reminders

Because the AI assistant knows which steps have been completed and which haven’t, it automatically:

  • Sends reminders
  • Flags overdue tasks
  • Alerts the business when bottlenecks occur
  • Escalates certain steps only when necessary

Instead of manually chasing clients for missing documents, the workflow chases them automatically.

4. A Complete View of Client Progress—Without Logging Into Multiple Systems

Your team sees:

  • A clear task checklist
  • Which steps the client completed
  • What still needs to happen
  • Whether any third-party actions remain pending

No more hunting through email threads, waiting for clients to “get back to you”, or logging in to external portals just to check progress.

What This Means for Your Practice

What you should expect:

  • Faster onboarding
  • Higher completion rates
  • Fewer manual reminders
  • Less time wasted dealing with confusion or errors
  • Better client experience—from day one
  • Stronger compliance through clear audit trails

Clients appreciate being guided, step-by-step, through tasks they often find confusing. Your team enjoys the time saved. And your business feels more professional, organised, and modern.

AI Automation Isn’t the Future – It’s Already Here

For many firms, client onboarding is the most time-consuming part of the engagement lifecycle. It’s also the easiest to improve.

With MyDocSafe client portals—and the AI assistants that power them—you can turn a fragmented, error-prone process into a seamless workflow where nothing slips through the cracks.

If you’re ready to automate the tasks that used to drain your time and your team’s patience, start exploring AI-enabled onboarding in MyDocSafe today.

There are two options:

  1. A do-it-yourself option: build your agent and train it using your internal materials.  Then deploy in the MyDocSafe client portal. Tell your clients to use the assistant as a guide when getting signed up and later as a support assistant.  Find out more here  https://ai4u.digital/blog
    1. Pros: Fast and inexpensive
    2. Cons: no Agentic features such as hand holding through a complex process
    3. Process outline:
      1. signup for a trial at https://ai4u.digital
      2. create your project
      3. build your knowledge base
      4. test your agent via the sandbox
      5. deploy on MyDocSafe website
  2. Work with us and the ai4u team.  Here you can expect to get an agent that automates anything you need automated.
    1. Pros: a full agentic AI agent that assists your clients in completing complex workflows that span multiple software systems
    2. Cons: investment and time
    3. Process outline:
      1. we start with an exploratory chat about your workflow – the more you already know the better
      2. we then prepare a priced proposal for a pilot
      3. once terms are agreed, we’ll build and deploy your assistant, you’ll test it and give us feedback
      4. after an iteration (or two), the agent should be ready for deployment
      5. once deployed, you take control over any fine tuning and maintance of the agent

FAQs

What is ai4u?

It’s a company separate from MyDocSafe, but co-founded by MyDocSafe’s MD.   It was founded in 2024.

What LLMs are used?

Currently, publicly available ones.  On-prem solution using open source LLMs is available for enterprise clients.

What about security and privacy?

Proof-of-concept will be built in the fastest and cheapest manner to minimise investment risk.   Most use cases will not need any other work.  However,  we always advise to perform risk assessment to analyse any exposure to potential data leakage.   We will then work on adding any extra security features based on that analysis.