Working smarter

We taught our booking system to answer for us.

By Teresa & Sem Abrahams · 4 min read

We once wrote a piece about the eleven emails every entertainer sends before a single gig — from “are you available?” to “paid in full.” For forty years those eleven emails were ours to type, between shows, in the car, from memory. This is about what happened when we handed them to an assistant that can actually do the work.

“Run it by talking to it”

A booking link already turned the front of that chain into one tap: the client picks the date and the show, ActBook checks whether we're really free, collects the details, and takes a deposit. But there's a whole second half a performer still runs by hand — the “can you also do a workshop?”, the quote, the contract, the invoice, the day-of text. So we opened the whole system up to an assistant and let it run that half by conversation. It looks like this:

That isn't a mock-up. The assistant checked travel-aware availability (it knew Toledo on Sunday put Detroit out of reach), priced the package from our own catalogue, generated the contract from our template, attached a card deposit link that pays into our own account, and set up the notification — the same actions we'd have done by hand across five or six emails.

It's the same system, with a new front door

Here's the part that matters: nothing new is running the business. It's the same software that's booked our own shows since 1986. We just gave it an open API — every screen, from availability to invoices to texts, reachable by a program — and then let an AI assistant drive that API. Bring your own assistant or use ours; it can talk to ActBook the way a person clicking around would, only faster.

The performing was never the hard part. Neither, it turns out, is the admin — once something else is willing to type the eleven emails.

Where we drew the line

An assistant that can spend money and text your clients is only a good idea with the brakes built in, so we built them first. Every action it takes is logged — a full trail of what changed and which key did it. Access is scoped: you decide whether an assistant can only read, or also write, take payments, or message clients. Anything that moves money or sends a text can be run as a dry run first, so you see exactly what would happen before it does. It's an add-on you switch on deliberately, on any plan, not something quietly running your account.

Why we bothered

Because we're still the ones on stage. After four decades we still perform, and we still book on ActBook — and the last thing a working performer needs is more screens to babysit. The whole point of the software was to stop being the bottleneck between “are you available?” and “you're booked.” Letting you run the whole thing from a text message, on your phone, between shows, is just that same idea taken as far as it goes. The eleven emails still happen. You've just stopped being the one who types them.

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