An assistant that asks before it acts

Companion is Jimdo's AI assistant, and one of its Q3 goals was to recommend and act on invoicing. With money, the risk is a wrong invoice going out to a real client.

I set three rules. Companion asks only for what is missing. Nothing exists until the seller approves it. Every card has two ways out, so there is never a dead end.

We enabled two invoice jobs inside Companion. A seller can start an invoice from any page they already use, with no trip to the editor first. They can also ask which invoices are still unpaid, select the ones they mean right in the answer and ask for a reminder with a payment link.

Selecting in the answer is the point of the second job. Anything Companion lists can be opened or pulled back into the conversation, so the seller never retypes which invoice they mean.

The Companion Kit is a UI kit made to unblock teams fast while Companion's interface grew and its design patterns were still being aligned. We were the first team to adopt it.

I didn't wait for a final interface. I solved our invoice jobs with what the kit already had, its panel, cards and input, and that unblocked the team. Every screen in this case is built from kit components.

Being first meant solving real use cases while the patterns were still open, and helping align them so they would work for every team. Referencing an invoice in the chat was one of them. The first idea showed Add to chat only on hover, and hover alone is not a control.

Opening an invoice is what a row does everywhere, so the row keeps that job. Selecting rows moves Add to chat to the card footer, where it fits with a label. The reference lands as a chip above the input that the seller can remove, and sending still needs their approval. It uses only the kit's list item with checkbox and the card footer, so I put it forward as the standard way to reference any resource.

To keep stakeholders aligned, I wrote the work in phases, each with a goal and a measure. Phase 1 was create from anywhere: an invoice can start on any page the seller already uses, and the measure is invoices started from the panel and sellers who issue a first invoice. Phase 2 was acting on what Companion shows you.

The flows also went through design critique, and I kept the feedback on the board, next to the screens it was about.

Companion's agent runs behind a flag and is still off in production, so there are no impact numbers to show.