An AI assistant for consultants, coaches and trainers: what it takes off your plate

Where a solo consultant’s week goes

Ask a few independents what they would drop first and the answer is rarely the clients. It is the small recurring jobs around them. Six come up again and again, and each one fits an assistant that works inside your own email, calendar and documents.

1. Client email replies

Rescheduling requests, “can you send the slides again”, questions about what a package includes. The assistant reads the thread, writes a draft in your voice and leaves it in Gmail Drafts for you. Outlook works too: it can read your mail and draft there.

2. Scheduling sessions in Google Calendar

It can check your day and book meetings. “Find two slots next week for a 60-minute session with Sam, not before 10:00, and draft the email offering them” is a normal request. You approve the email; the booking follows what you agreed.

3. Prep briefs before a call

Before a session it can pull the recent email thread with that client and the Google Docs you shared, then give you a one-page brief: what was agreed last time, what is open, what they asked about most recently.

4. Call notes into a follow-up and a proposal outline

Paste or type your notes after the call. It drafts the follow-up summary for you to send and, if the work is going further, an outline for a proposal in Google Docs. The outline is a starting structure. The scope and the wording of what you promise stay yours.

5. Tracking engagements and invoices in Sheets

If you keep a spreadsheet of clients, engagements and what has been invoiced, it can read and update it in Google Sheets: add the new engagement, mark a line as sent, list what looks overdue so you know whom to chase.

6. A weekday morning brief

A scheduled job runs while your laptop is shut and sends the brief to the chat app you use: today’s calendar, client emails waiting for an answer, and anything on the tracking sheet that needs attention.

One illustrative day

Take Dana, an invented independent leadership coach with a handful of regular clients. Every name, time and item below is an example, not a customer story. On her first day she told the agent, in plain words, how she signs off, how long her sessions are, and which days she keeps free. Then she set up a weekday job:

Every weekday at 7:30, send me a brief on Telegram:
today's calendar, client emails I haven't answered,
and any engagement on my tracking sheet marked "invoice due".
For each unanswered email, save a draft reply in Gmail Drafts.
Don't send anything.

• 7:30. The brief arrives on her phone. Three sessions today, two emails drafted, one flagged: a client asking whether she can change the fee for the next block. She reads it over coffee.
• 8:15. She opens Gmail Drafts. One reply is fine as written and she sends it. The other needs a different tone for a nervous client, so she tells the agent what to change and sends the revised draft.
• 9:30, before the first session. She asks: “Brief me on my 10:00 with Alex.” It summarises the last email thread and the shared Doc: the goal they set, the exercise Alex said he would try, the question left open. A short read instead of a search.
• 12:00, after the session. She types five lines of notes. The agent drafts a follow-up summary with the two agreed actions and saves it as a draft. She trims one sentence and sends it.
• Afternoon. A prospective client who has already written to her wants a proposal. The agent creates a Google Doc outline from her notes: background, goals, format, schedule, fee placeholder. She fills in the fee herself.
• End of day. She asks it to mark Alex’s session as delivered in the Sheet and to list invoices more than two weeks old. She sends those reminders herself.

None of this replaced Dana’s coaching. It cut the part of the day where she was a secretary, and it did so with her checking each thing that went out.

“Don’t send anything” is an instruction, not a technical lock. Once Gmail is connected, the agent can send mail if you ask it to. Keep the instruction in every email job and look in your Sent folder now and then.

What to keep doing yourself

An assistant is good at routine and drafts. It is a poor stand-in for the things clients actually pay you for. Keep these with you:

• Judgement. What to say about a client’s situation, what to recommend, when to push back. A draft can be tidy and still miss what you noticed in the room.
• Pricing and scope. Fees, discounts, extensions and what is included. Give it your published rates and tell it to leave out any price that is not on them, then decide the rest yourself.
• Sensitive client matters. A client who is struggling, a conflict between colleagues, a health or family issue that came up in a session, a complaint. Tell the agent to flag these at the top of your brief and not draft anything.
• Advice that needs a qualified professional. It is not a source of legal, tax, medical or financial advice, and a draft that touches those areas should be checked by you first.
• The final read of anything a client sees. AI makes mistakes: a misread date, a name mixed up, a tone slightly off. Reading every draft before it goes is part of the job.

A simple standing rule covers most of this: “If an email is about money, a complaint, or something personal, don’t draft it. Put it at the top of my brief.”

Confidentiality, honestly

Client work is confidential, so this deserves a plain answer rather than a reassuring one.

• Your agent is private to your account and never shared with other users. It runs on a machine ReadyHermes looks after, on servers in the EU.
• ReadyHermes does not use your conversations to train AI, and does not sell your data.
• When the agent drafts something, the text it is working from goes to an AI model provider, possibly outside the EU. That is how the drafting happens. We cannot make promises about what a model provider does with it, so read that provider’s own terms if your clients’ details are sensitive.
• It only reaches the apps you connect, and you connect each one yourself through a sign-in link it sends in the chat.

If a contract with a client limits where their information may be processed, or you work in a field with its own confidentiality rules, check with the client or your professional body before you let any AI tool read that correspondence. A sensible compromise is to start with your own admin (your calendar, your invoicing sheet, your own templates) and add client threads only when you are comfortable.

What it costs, and how to start

The free trial lasts 1 hour and needs no card. It starts on Lite. After that, Lite is $3.99 a month (regularly $5) and Pro is $6.99 a month (regularly $10). The offer prices stay the same when you renew, and local tax is added where it applies. Pro has twice the CPU and memory of Lite and four times the storage. The AI allowance is the same on both.

Both plans include $1 of AI each month on DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, roughly 100 everyday requests, renewing on your billing date. How far that goes depends on the work: a daily brief, drafts and meeting preps use more than one-off questions, so a busy practice may run out before the month ends. When it does, the agent tells you the renewal date, and on a paid plan you can add your own API key (OpenRouter, OpenAI, Claude, Gemini or another provider), billed by that provider.

A sensible way to use the trial:

1. Open the chat and ask it to connect Gmail. It sends a sign-in link; sign in and come back.
2. Tell it how you sign off, your session length, your published rates, and paste two replies you were pleased with. It keeps these in long-term memory.
3. Ask for a one-off run: “Draft replies to client emails from the last 2 days I haven’t answered. Don’t send anything.” Read the drafts and say what to change.
4. Connect Google Calendar and ask for a brief on your next call. Then try turning notes into a follow-up draft.
5. If the drafts are close to how you write, ask for the weekday morning brief and connect Telegram, WhatsApp or another chat app so it reaches your phone.

The step-by-step guide shows each screen. For the email part in more detail, read can ChatGPT answer my emails. If you also run a small business with staff or a shop, see an AI assistant for small business owners. Plans are listed under pricing.