Every project sounds exciting in a contact form.
An intake agent scopes each inquiry the way you would in a first meeting (programme, floor area, budget envelope, timeline, planning constraints) so the meetings you take are with projects that can actually happen.
Set up from your practice, your fee logic, your standards.
Your portfolio makes them want you. The form tells you nothing back.
Case studies, awards, the practice story: they earn the inquiry. Then a contact form takes "renovation, house, as soon as possible" and calls it a lead.
Keep the portfolio, it wins the interest. But the form should be doing the first meeting, not deferring it.
You can scope every inquiry before the first meeting exists.
An agent asks what you would ask on a first call: programme, floor area, budget envelope, timeline, planning constraints, and answers honestly on fees and feasibility.
Good fits arrive as a brief you read in a minute. Wrong-fit projects get a clear, polite no.
Common objections, answered.
“I'll just add budget and timeline fields to my inquiry form.”
A form field filters but never explains: it cannot tell a visitor what a realistic envelope looks like, or what planning does to their timeline. A conversation does, and hands you a scoped brief.
“An AI is going to talk about money for my practice?”
It talks in the ranges you define, the way a careful practice does in a first meeting, and never pretends to be an estimate. You approve the voice before it meets anyone.
“The interesting projects need a real conversation.”
They get one, earlier: the agent scopes the project so your first meeting starts on the work, not the interrogation. The dull-but-doable and the impossible both get sorted before your calendar hears about them.
Live before your next inquiry lands.
Point it at your portfolio and fee logic. Review what it learned.
Flow, criteria, voice: yours, approved before it meets a visitor.
The widget replaces the project-inquiry form.
You already run this interview.
The agent asks the same first-meeting questions before the meeting exists, so the time you give a project goes to one that can happen.