# Morning Desk: a sales dashboard for a consumer-products company

A New York company that designs, licenses, makes and distributes branded products. For one salesperson whose day ran through his inbox, we built Morning Desk: the inbox, sorted into the day's work.

Client not named. Every number came from the client.

## The business
A long-established New York company that designs, licenses, manufactures and distributes branded consumer products across many categories, selling to retailers from dollar stores to department stores. A salesperson's day runs through his email: buyer questions, orders, follow-ups and approvals, all mixed together in one inbox.

## What we found
- The inbox was the to-do list, and it didn't sort itself. The work that mattered each morning was buried among everything else that arrived overnight.
- Security came first. A company that handles licensed brands for major retailers can't hand an AI tool the keys to its systems on day one.

## What we recommended
### Your own team can do it now
- Start with documents only: a few files someone chooses, with nothing connected to company systems.

### A Claude skill or assistant on a standard setup
- Morning Desk: a dashboard built on top of the salesperson's existing inbox, so the day starts with the work already sorted. No new system for him to learn.

### Needs a developer (we refer this out)
- Connections to company systems only after IT signs off, read-only first, and with a person approving every action.

### Leave it alone
- Don't connect AI to company systems before IT has signed off, however useful it looks. Earn access one step at a time.

## What they chose to do
They took all of it: nothing was turned down or put off. Because they're careful about security, the next step being discussed is a contained pilot in a single department, so that if anything ever went wrong it would stay in that one department. Which department hasn't been decided yet.

## What happened
Morning Desk is still in daily use. It started with one salesperson; about six salespeople in the same company use it now.

## What I'd do differently
Plan more time for training and follow-up. Building the tool is half the job; teaching people to use it is the other half. With one person that was easy to underestimate. With six people it's a different job, so training time now goes into the plan from day one.

Source: https://aidvance.xyz/work/consumer-products