Building in plain sight: SmartPlans nears the finish line

SmartPlans is going live very soon, and as we complete the latest rounds of testing and feedback, the learnings have continued to come in. Here’s what our Beta customers have told us over the last couple of weeks (and if you want to be first in line when SmartPlans goes live, don’t forget to sign up to the waitlist here.)

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1. The time savings are real - and bigger than we expected

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We always suspected SmartPlans would save time…we didn't anticipate quite how much.

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This month, multiple partners reported cutting their assessment write-up time roughly in half. One care manager told us a full support plan - nine separate assessments - that previously took "a full day if not more" now takes half that. Another agency logged their first recording and saved over an hour on that single assessment alone. A third partner calculated approximately two hours saved per session.

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What's interesting is where the time is going. It's not just faster typing - it's that assessors can be fully present in the room. When you're not furiously scribbling notes, you can actually listen. You can follow the conversation and ask the follow-up question you'd normally miss because you're still writing down the last answer.

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One assessor described finishing a hospital discharge assessment and - for the first time she could remember - having a few minutes just to sit and chat with the service user. No agenda. No clipboard. Just two people talking. Under the old way of working, that wouldn't have happened.

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This is what we mean when we talk about person-centred care - it's a practical consequence of removing the admin burden from the room.

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2. "It's already indispensable"

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One partner, when asked what we could do to make SmartPlans indispensable to their team, said: "It's already indispensable.”

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We’re also pleased to see that partners aren’t accepting suggestions uncritically; the best teams review carefully, adjust phrasing, and add clinical context the AI can't supply. But the starting point is good enough that meaningful editing, rather than full rewriting, is the norm.

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One partner described their quality control process as: "we don't just add it, we go through it, we change a lot of words." That's exactly the right behaviour - AI as a first draft, human as the editor. The fact that this is how people are naturally using it is a good sign.

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3. The person-centred signal is stronger than we expected

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Three separate partners this month independently landed on the same observation: SmartPlans makes care plans more person-centred, because it captures what the service user actually said.

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Previously, a care plan might say "client requires assistance with personal care in the morning." Now it might say that and include the client's own words about why their morning routine matters to them, or what they're proud of being able to do independently. That's a meaningfully different kind of record.

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One care manager told us: "It's very person-centred. It's very relevant because it's what they're saying."

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Another described using SmartPlans to frame consent conversations differently - telling service users that the recording is there to make sure their voice is in their care plan. That reframing has significantly reduced consent hesitancy.

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A third partner, who had been sceptical about AI in care, described the ability to quote clients directly as "something new and something that obviously makes us better at making care plans."

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We didn't design "better quotes" as a feature. It emerged from the workflow. That's one of those things that's hard to predict in advance and very meaningful once you see it.

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4. Recordings are becoming a training tool - which we didn't expect

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Something unexpected: multiple agencies have started using SmartPlans recordings as a staff development tool.

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Assessors are listening back to their own recordings to hear how they conduct assessments. One care manager described the experience as: "Such a good learning for me... I hear my own assessment but in the office later." Staff who can't attend assessments are listening back to understand how conversations flow. Junior colleagues are being exposed to senior practitioners' techniques without needing to shadow them in person.

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This is a use case we didn't build for. But it makes complete sense - you now have a faithful, searchable record of every assessment conversation. Of course people are going to use it to learn from.

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SmartPlans isn't just an admin tool. It's becoming part of how agencies develop their people.

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5. SmartMeetings: more demand than we anticipated

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We've been quietly building SmartMeetings - AI-assisted transcription and summarisation for internal meetings - and running early conversations about it with SmartPlans partners.

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The appetite has been even higher than we expected. Partners who currently use a patchwork of general-purpose tools (Microsoft Word's transcription, consumer AI assistants, third-party voice recorders) are interested in something purpose-built for care that integrates with the rest of their workflow.

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One interesting observation: a partner whose team already uses several consumer AI tools for meeting notes is treating SmartMeetings as a direct benchmark comparison. Their honest engagement is useful - they'll tell us clearly if we're not better than what they already have for free.

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We're ready

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Weeks of feedback, across more than a dozen conversations, distils into this:

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The product is working - the time savings are real, care plan quality is improving, person-centred framing is resonating in ways we didn't fully anticipate. The deepest adopters have built SmartPlans into the fabric of how they work - it's the first thing they do for every new assessment, without thinking about it.

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The feedback from this testing phase wasn’t about just validating the product, but actively shaping it. We addressed the biggest technical challenges our partners surfaced. We built the features they told us mattered most. We watched the care plans get better.

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The market is moving too - agencies are becoming more AI-capable, more opinionated, and more demanding. That's exactly the environment SmartPlans was built for.

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We've spent months building in plain sight. And very (very) soon, SmartPlans will be available to everyone.

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Building in Plain Sight is Birdie's series on building SmartPlans and other AI products - what we're building, what we're learning, and what we're getting wrong. Visit the Smarter Care Lab to learn more.

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