🎮 The Next Input — Issue #046

Close Deals Faster

Aaron Bost
September 03, 2025

In partnership with

⚡ The Briefing — 60 sec

Lawyer penalised in Australian first after using AI-generated false citations in court. Maybe don’t trust ChatGPT in front of the judge?
OpenAI to route sensitive conversations to GPT-5 and add parental controls. A long overdue (and much needed) step.
Anthropic raises Series F at $183B valuation. Big money, bigger bets.

🛠️ The Playbook — AI-First Legal & Compliance Guard

Mission Build a workflow that checks all AI-generated outputs for compliance issues (false citations, PII, risky content) before they ever reach a customer or a court.
Difficulty Advanced | Build time 90 min
ROI Protects brand/legal exposure while saving ≈ 8–10 h/week of manual reviews.

Step	Action
1	Trigger – Any AI-generated doc tagged `external` in Notion/Docs/CRM.
2	Claude 3.5 Sonnet – Prompt: “Check this document for accuracy, citations, and legal risk. Flag PII, unsupported claims, and high-risk language.”
3	TrellisGuard API – Secondary scan for compliance + PII leakage.
4	Google Sheets – Append to `AI_Compliance_Log {doc_id, risk, severity, summary}`.
5	Slack Push – If severity ≥3, alert #legal-approvals with quick Approve/Reject.
6	Auto-Release – If severity ≤2, publish directly to client-facing system.
7	Fail-safe – If AI cannot determine confidence ≥0.8, escalate to manual reviewer.

Pro tip: Add a “red/yellow/green” traffic light column in Docs so users see instantly whether content passed checks.

🗺️ The Side Quest

Each week, we answer a question from a reader. This week, we're fixing the biggest bottleneck in B2B sales.

This week's question:

"Our deal desk is a major bottleneck. It takes our sales reps hours to manually create quotes and get approvals. How could we use an AI agent to act as a 'Deal Desk Assistant' that helps reps build and validate quotes instantly?"

Answer:

An AI Deal Desk isn't just about making quotes faster; it's about making them fast and safe. The goal is to protect your margins and ensure compliance while accelerating revenue.

The secret is to create a "Rulebook." This is a structured database (an Airtable or Google Sheet works perfectly) that codifies your entire sales policy: your price book, discount tiers, approval matrix, and required legal terms for different regions.

Once the Rulebook exists, the workflow is simple. A sales rep types a command like /deal build in Slack with the customer's details.

Behind the scenes, the AI assistant:

Reads the live opportunity data from your CRM.
Consults the Rulebook to validate the request (e.g., checks the discount against the rep's authority).
Drafts a compliant quote, pulling the correct pricing and legal clauses.

The most powerful part is the smart approval routing. If the quote is standard (e.g., within the rep's discount limit), it can be auto-approved and generated. If it's an exception, the AI automatically routes it to the correct manager in Slack with a summary and simple "Approve / Reject" buttons.

The key is to let deterministic code handle the critical math (pricing, margins), while the AI handles the complex logic of generating the quote summary, justification, and selecting the right terms. This turns a multi-hour relay between sales, finance, and legal into a process that takes minutes.

🎯 The Arsenal — Tools & Prompts

Asset	What it does	Link
TrellisGuard	Scans AI outputs for PII & compliance.	https://trellisguard.ai
Feedly AI	Surfaces legal/regulatory news.	https://feedly.com/ai
Notion AI API	Hooks into documents for tagging + triggers.	https://developers.notion.com
Prompt · Compliance Review	Turns output into structured risk data.

Review this AI-generated document. Output JSON: 
{citations_verified: true/false, risk_category: [PII|Unsupported Claims|Legal Risk|None], severity: 1-5, summary: "short reason"}.

💡 Free Office Hours

Need a deal desk assistant or compliance guardrail?
Book a free 15-minute Office Hours slot—no sales pitch, just workflows solved.

→ Grab a slot: https://calendly.com/aaron-cylentis/the-next-input-office-hours

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🕹️ Game Over

Automate one compliance guard tonight—tomorrow’s risk team will thank you.
Share your win; you could headline Issue #047.

— Aaron
Automating the boring. Amplifying the brilliant.

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