# Executive Ask: Ask Your Business Anything: done-for-you AI automation by BufferSol

> Executive Ask is a done-for-you AI assistant BufferSol connects to every system your company runs: CRM, helpdesk, ERP and accounting, HR and payroll, inbox and calendar, docs and drives, and your data warehouse. Leaders ask questions in plain English in Slack, Teams, web or mobile and get an answer with links to the exact records behind it. With approval, it can create a task, draft an email or open a ticket. Permissions follow each user's existing access, and every answer is logged.

- Canonical: https://buffersoltech.com/done-for-you/automations/executive-ask
- Industries: All industries
- Provider: BufferSol Technologies (New York; serving the US, UK, Ireland, Canada and the EU)
- Timeline: live in 3 to 6 weeks
- Pricing: quoted after a short scoping call

## Ask any question about your business and get a sourced answer from every system

**Who it is for:** CEOs, COOs, CFOs and department heads at companies of roughly 50 to 2,000 people whose data lives in a dozen or more systems and whose questions today go through an analyst, an assistant or a spreadsheet.

### Signs you need it
- A simple question such as how last week went takes a day and an analyst to answer
- Two teams bring different numbers for the same metric to the same meeting
- You keep a private spreadsheet because the dashboards never answer the question you actually have
- Board and investor prep means a week of people exporting from systems they rarely open
- You hear about a slipped deal, a late invoice or an unhappy key account after it is too late to act

## Business outcomes
- **Answers when you need them.** Leaders get an answer during the meeting or on the way to it, with the records behind it, instead of waiting days for a report that arrives after the decision.
- **One answer everyone can check.** Every response shows its sources, its assumptions and the metric definitions it used, so teams debate the decision rather than whose number is right.
- **From question to action.** When the answer calls for action, the assistant drafts the email, task or ticket in the right system and waits for the leader to approve it.

## How it works today
1. A leader has a question: why margin dipped, which deals slipped, whether a key customer is unhappy, how long cash will last
2. They message an analyst, an assistant or a department head, who exports data from Salesforce, NetSuite, Zendesk or the warehouse
3. The analyst rebuilds a familiar spreadsheet, reconciles it against another team's figures and writes a summary
4. The answer arrives a day or several days later and usually prompts a follow-up question and another round
5. The spreadsheet is saved somewhere new, and next month the same question starts the cycle again

Hidden costs:
- Decisions wait on reports, or get made on instinct because the report would arrive too late to matter
- Analysts and finance staff spend their best hours rebuilding the same answers instead of doing real analysis
- Conflicting numbers from different systems wear down trust in every dashboard the company pays for

## How it works done for you
1. BufferSol connects read access through official APIs and connectors: Salesforce or HubSpot, Zendesk or Intercom, NetSuite, QuickBooks or Xero, Workday, Rippling or BambooHR, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, SharePoint or Drive, and Snowflake or BigQuery
2. We agree a metric dictionary with your finance and operations leads, defining revenue, bookings, churn, runway, utilization and headcount, so the assistant calculates exactly the way your team does
3. A leader asks in Slack, Teams, the web app or on mobile, for example: what is our cash runway if the two biggest invoices pay late?
4. The agent plans the question, checks what this user may see in each source system, queries only the systems it needs and works through the calculation step by step
5. It replies in plain English with the figures, the assumptions it made and links to the underlying invoices, deals, tickets or documents; if data is missing or conflicting, it says so rather than guessing
6. If the answer points to an action, it drafts it, such as a task in Asana, an email in Outlook or Gmail, or a ticket in Jira or Zendesk, and nothing is sent or created until the user approves
7. Every question, every system touched, every answer and every approved action is written to an audit log your admins can review and export

## What changes for the team
- **CEO or COO.** Today: Waiting for reports, or asking three people the same question and getting three different numbers Done for you: Asking directly, checking the sources in one click and moving straight to the decision
- **CFO or finance lead.** Today: Fielding one-off requests and rebuilding the same cash, margin and pipeline spreadsheets every month Done for you: Owning the metric definitions and spending the time on scenarios, planning and the board
- **Analyst or chief of staff.** Today: Exporting, reconciling and formatting answers to questions that will be asked again next month Done for you: Working on the deeper analysis the assistant surfaces and keeping the data model healthy

## KPIs we measure
- **Time to answer:** Time from question to answer for a fixed set of common leadership questions, measured by hand before launch and from the assistant's log after
- **One-off report requests:** Requests from leadership to finance and analytics, counted from tickets, email and Slack for a month before and after launch
- **Answer accuracy:** Each week the metric owners check a sample of answers against the source systems, and every error is traced and fixed
- **Answers with full sources:** Answers that link every record they relied on, counted from the audit log
- **Weekly active leaders:** Distinct people asking questions each week, from usage logs
- **Actions approved:** Tasks, emails and tickets drafted and approved through the assistant, broken down by system

## Industry data
- 47%: of digital workers struggle to find the information needed to effectively perform their jobs (Gartner, 2023) ([Gartner](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-05-10-gartner-survey-reveals-47-percent-of-digital-workers-struggle-to-find-the-information-needed-to-effectively-perform-their-jobs))
- At least two hours a day: spent by employees looking for the documents, information or people they need, about 25 percent of the workweek (Glean / The Harris Poll, 2022) ([Glean](https://www.glean.com/press/hybrid-workplace-habits-hangups-report-frustrated-employees-spend-a-quarter-of-workweek-searching-for-information-needed-to-do-their-jobs))
- 52%: of executives feel removed from everyday processes due to delays in data reaching their desks (Confluent survey, 2024) ([IT Brief UK](https://itbrief.co.uk/story/uk-executives-face-decision-challenges-due-to-data-delays))

## Systems it connects to
Salesforce, HubSpot, Zendesk, NetSuite, QuickBooks, Workday, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, Snowflake, Slack

## Guardrails
- Permissions follow each user's existing access in every source system; the assistant never shows data a person could not open themselves
- Every answer lists its sources with links to the underlying records, and states plainly when data is missing, stale or conflicting
- Read-only by default; sending an email, creating a task or opening a ticket needs the user's explicit approval every time
- Every question, query, answer and action is logged with the user, the time and the systems touched, and admins can review or export the log
- Sensitive areas such as payroll, HR cases and board material can be limited to named roles, and your data is never used to train public models

## What teams say about this work
- Workers now juggle far more applications than a few years ago, and nearly half say they struggle to find the information they need to do their jobs well. ([Gartner](https://www.gartner.com/en/newsroom/press-releases/2023-05-10-gartner-survey-reveals-47-percent-of-digital-workers-struggle-to-find-the-information-needed-to-effectively-perform-their-jobs))
- Senior executives say delays in data reaching their desks leave them removed from day-to-day operations, and many regret decisions they made quickly without enough data. ([IT Brief UK (Confluent survey)](https://itbrief.co.uk/story/uk-executives-face-decision-challenges-due-to-data-delays))
- Finance teams pull data from several source systems, and many CFOs still aggregate it by hand to build something close to a single source of truth. ([CPA Practice Advisor (Adaptive Insights survey)](https://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/2015/10/21/cfos-expect-avalanche-of-data-over-next-5-years-desire-single-reliable-source/20157/))
- Analysts describe a steady stream of quick-pull requests from business teams, rewriting similar queries and patching fragile spreadsheets each time, so they are always responding and never planning. ([OWOX](https://www.owox.com/blog/articles/analysts-guide-managing-one-off-ad-hoc-requests))
- Leaders who ask several people for the same operating figure, such as utilization, often get conflicting answers because data sits in silos and applications built up over decades. ([diginomica](https://diginomica.com/cfos-and-business-leaders-quest-single-source-truth))

## Delivery: live in 3 to 6 weeks
1. Week 1: discovery, access and a baseline of today's numbers.
2. Weeks 2–3: build the agents and connect your systems, with your rules and approvals.
3. Weeks 3–5: test on your real history, then pilot on live work with your team reviewing.
4. Weeks 4–6: staged go-live, training, dashboards and handover.

## Executive Ask questions for this workflow
- What's our cash runway if the two biggest invoices pay late?
- Which deals slipped this week, and what reason did each rep log?
- Which of our top 20 customers opened a support ticket this month, and are any of them up for renewal this quarter?

## Frequently asked questions
### How is Executive Ask different from a BI dashboard?
Dashboards answer the questions someone predicted when they built them. Executive Ask answers the question you have right now, across systems no single dashboard joins, such as the CRM, the ERP and the helpdesk together. It shows its working, links to the records and can draft the follow-up action. Most clients keep their dashboards, and the assistant reads them as one more source.

### Can a user see data they shouldn't?
No. Before it queries anything, the assistant checks each user's access in every source system, using the roles and sharing rules you already maintain in Salesforce, NetSuite, Workday, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace. If a sales director cannot open payroll in Workday today, they cannot get payroll answers from the assistant either. Restricted areas can be locked down further, and every query is logged.

### What happens when the data is missing or conflicts?
It tells you. When records are missing, stale or disagree between systems, the answer explains which sources conflict and by how much, and links to both. It does not fill gaps with guesses. Your metric owners can then fix the definition or the data at the source, and that fix applies to every future answer. Weekly accuracy checks catch drift early.

### Can it take actions, or only answer questions?
Both, with your approval. When an answer calls for action, the assistant can draft an email in Outlook or Gmail, create a task in Asana or Jira, open a ticket in Zendesk or ServiceNow, or propose a meeting time. You see the draft and approve it before anything is sent or created. You also decide which action types are allowed at all, and every approved action is logged.

### How long does it take to go live?
Executive Ask goes live in 3 to 6 weeks. We start with the systems behind your most frequent leadership questions, usually the CRM, accounting and the helpdesk, agree metric definitions with finance and operations, and test the assistant against a list of real questions your leaders have asked recently. It launches when its answers match what your team would produce, and more systems can follow.

### What does Executive Ask cost?
Executive Ask is quoted after a short scoping call. The price depends on how many systems we connect, how many people will use it, which actions you want it to take, and your security and hosting requirements. It can be added on top of any other BufferSol automation, and you get a fixed written scope before work starts, so the cost is clear upfront.