The situation
The director ran a dense, client-facing calendar across two regions: an international book of customers and prospects, dialling in across multiple time zones. Growth was good. The unit cost of growth was a calendar that no longer behaved itself — and a single recurring leak that was quietly consuming an hour-plus of high-leverage time every week.
The brief
"Fix the cancellation loop. Every dropped meeting costs me 15 minutes of admin to re-book. I'm doing it five times a week. Solve it in days, not months."
What we did
- Mapped the existing cancellation handling sequence end-to-end — from calendar event, to availability check, to attendee email, to confirmation and re-booking.
- Identified the four-step manual loop being repeated for every cancellation: check availability, find a replacement slot, draft an email with options, wait for reply, confirm, update the calendar.
- Connected directly to the director's existing Google Calendar — no new tooling for the user, no migration, no behaviour change required.
- Built and shipped a lightweight automation that triggers on a cancellation, scans availability against stated preferences, and handles the rescheduling exchange end-to-end.
Engagement length: 48 hours from brief to live · Deliverable: production automation deployed inside the existing calendar workflow
What we found
- Cancellations were running at 5+ per week — every one triggering the same manual loop. Compounding cost, not a one-off.
- Each cancellation consumed ~15 minutes of director time across availability checks, email back-and-forth, and re-confirmation. That is more than 75 minutes of senior, revenue-generating capacity gone every week.
- The loop ran entirely in the director's head and inbox. No assistant could absorb it without context loss; no scheduling tool fixed it because the issue was the cancellation, not the original booking.
What we recommended
AI-powered cancellation reschedule loop
Impact
75 min/wk of director time recovered (~£6.5k/yr estimated); 5+ scheduling cycles handled with no human touch
Complexity
Low — single-purpose automation, integrates with existing Google Calendar and email
Time to value
48 hours from brief to live in production
Connects to the calendar; on a cancellation event, scans availability against stated preferences, drafts a personalised reply with two or three replacement slots, and books the meeting once the attendee picks one. No human in the loop.
This was a rapid point-build, not a full Opportunity Audit. Adjacent automation opportunities (inbound triage, follow-up cadence, prep brief generation) were noted but not scoped in this engagement.
The outcome
- 75 minutes of director-level time recovered every week, redirected to client-facing and revenue activity.
- 5+ cancellations per week now handled fully automatically — zero human touch from cancellation event to confirmed re-booking.
- Zero scheduling friction for clients and prospects on the other side of the exchange — they receive proposed slots within minutes of cancelling.
- Live in production within 48 hours of kickoff. No new SaaS, no behaviour change, no migration.
Status: Live in production · single-problem rapid build · further automation opportunities not yet scoped