Problem
A nonprofit that runs a city-wide design festival collected 90+ event submissions a year through a web form. They came in incomplete or off-spec — weak descriptions, images that missed standards, missing fees — and staff cleaned each one by hand before it could flow into the CRM, email, and the public events gallery. None of those systems talked to each other.
Approach
Map the full intake-to-go-live pipeline, find the highest-pain step, and prove it could be automated before scoping the whole thing. The wedge: an AI layer on the intake form that validated and standardized each submission at the door, flagging incomplete or off-spec entries before they reached anything downstream.
Stack
A proof-of-concept built on top of the existing web intake form, with an AI validation and standardization layer sitting in front of the downstream CRM, email, and gallery tools.
What shipped
A validated POC: the AI intake layer cleaned and standardized messy submissions in a live demo, run against the festival’s real intake.
What’s next
The full pipeline integration — fee collection, venue matching, CRM sync, and gallery publishing — is mapped and scoped; the POC proved out the highest-pain step first.