How we saved €10K in 10 hours

Just like Wall Street nowadays, you might wonder if AI can help you save on your IT costs. You would be right, because it can. In our case: the visitor and package registration system.

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It’s not that we weren’t fans of Envoy. It’s a good product, which does what it needs to do: managing visitor registrations. ‘But at over €10.000 in yearly licensing, I would much rather invest those budgets in things that make us more productive,’ says Louis De Jaeger, our IT lead. What’s more, we underuse the functionalities, like desk or team room booking. ‘Because of the SaaS business model, those will cost you extra.’

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Years ago, before choosing Envoy, we had the Make or Buy discussion. But back then, the investment of building this ourselves just didn’t add up. ‘Then one night after work, seeing what other colleagues were doing with AI in product development, I put the AI agents to work. Three hours later, we had our own registration system.’

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'Three hours later, we had our own registration system.'

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Fellow team member Ferre then went to work to finish the tool. 'An hour everyday, for about two weeks, and we were ready for go-live.'

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If you want to look for similar cost efficiencies, here are a few pointers:

• Pick the right candidate for replacement: ‘This was a fairly straightforward use case. Not completely intertwined (like a CRM or ERP). Nor business-critical. If this fails, we can help ourselves with pen and paper for a few hours.’
• Build on the shoulders of low-code: ‘A lot of emphasis is placed on AI, but thanks to low-code solutions, we had a back-end in no time, sending visitor emails and creating WiFi codes. It hardly costs us a dime.’
• Make it look professional using your design system: ‘By hooking up our design system through an MCP, the check-in kiosk is perfectly on brand.’

We’re not necessarily in the business of building SaaS killers. But we think Louis and Ferre killed it here.

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