✨Assist: Designing AI workflows for legacy platforms at scale
A 0→1 AI feature that shipped to thousands of clients and measurably reduced customer response times across EverCommerce's core products.
The challenge
EverCommerce's first AI exploration had no playbook. Before designing anything, I audited every unique context across 2-3 legacy products where AI assistance needed to live, finding a single pattern flexible enough to span all of them.
The "subtle-first" principle
The core insight was placement. Inspired by Superhuman and Apple Intelligence, Assist lives at the bottom of existing text inputs, never above the fold, never a modal, always where the user already is.
Anticipating user needs
Being of service to users, Assist introduced shortcut-based editing patterns, letting users refine, shorten, or adjust tone without rewriting from scratch. The interaction model was directly informed by interactions like autocomplete, adapted for the specific context of customer response workflows.
Evolving scope
What started as AI response generation grew into a full resolution workflow: reply, call, note, resurvey, resolve. The Resolved state wasn't in the original brief, rather it emerged from asking what it actually means to recover an at-risk customer relationship.
Accessibility — Designing for Every User
The AI Insights dashboard feeding Assist was redesigned to eliminate color-only risk indicators. Universal iconography and WCAG AA color tokens replaced them — clearer for everyone, accessible for all.
Outcomes
Assist launched to strong adoption with measurable impact on response times and revenue retention. More durably, it established the design language and component foundation for every AI feature that followed.