First Focus is kicking off 2026 by putting our AI Investment Fund to work, backing five client ideas that are designed to deliver real commercial returns.
We’re investing $100,000 to help our clients move beyond shiny demos and vague productivity promises and instead use AI to solve real business problems that actually move the needle.
The rule is simple: if an idea doesn’t shift a number that matters, it doesn’t get funded.
Each successful submission receives $20,000 in support, including dedicated engineering time, a project manager, and hands-on consultancy to take the idea from concept to production. And we don’t stop at “we built it.” These projects are tracked over time to make sure they’re adopted, embedded, and delivering the returns they were meant to.
About the Pengana
Pengana is a diversified investment management firm with a long history in the Australian market, managing multiple investment strategies across equities, alternatives, and specialist mandates. With a growing client base spanning advisers, institutions, and direct investors, the business operates in an environment where trust, responsiveness, and clarity are non-negotiable.
Client service sits at the centre of Pengana’s operating model. Their client services team is the front line for investor communication, handling a high volume of inbound email every day across multiple products, structures, and jurisdictions. These enquiries range from straightforward administrative questions through to time-sensitive, product-specific requests that require precision and careful language.
What makes Pengana’s challenge unique isn’t a lack of process or capability, it’s the standard they hold themselves to. Responses must be:
As the business grows and product complexity increases, so does the volume of inbound communication. Much of that volume follows predictable patterns, but still requires careful handling such as classifying the email, extracting key information, referencing the right product, and drafting a response that aligns with approved language.
The pressure point isn’t client demand, which is a good problem to have.
The pressure point is that highly capable people are spending large portions of their day on repetitive email triage and drafting work, slowing response times and limiting how much the team can scale without adding headcount.
Pengana reached a familiar inflection point:
This initiative is about choosing the second path.
Pengana proposed an AI assistant embedded directly into Outlook and Microsoft 365 to streamline the handling of inbound client emails.
Rather than introducing another system or workflow, the assistant lives where the work already happens. It will:
Human review and approval remain central to the process. The assistant doesn’t send emails on its own, it prepares high-quality drafts so client service team members can focus on judgement, nuance, and relationship management rather than starting from a blank page.
The objective is simple: reduce time per email while maintaining or improving the response quality and consistency.
Manual email triage and drafting was identified as a clear operational drag on the client services team – slowing response times and inflating labour costs without improving outcomes.
The proposed assistant is expected to reduce average handling time by approximately 50%.
That translates to an estimated $125,000 in annual benefit, from:
This equates to roughly a 6x return in year one, increasing to more than 11x by year two as the solution beds in.
The idea stood out because it delivers immediate efficiency gains, sits entirely within existing workflows, and has a clear, measurable path to ROI without introducing risk to client experience or compliance.
The assistant will integrate directly with Outlook to ensure minimal disruption and fast adoption.
It will be trained on:
Guardrails will be applied to ensure responses remain safe, compliant, and on brand. A 10–12 week pilot will be run to refine prompts, categories, and workflows before a broader rollout across the client services team.
Success will be measured through:
The ultimate test is whether Pengana can handle increasing client volume without a proportional increase in headcount – while maintaining the service standards the business is known for.
As the pilot progresses, this case study will be updated with real performance data and insights from the people using the system every day.
This isn’t about automating client relationships. It’s about removing friction from the work so experienced people can focus on what actually matters – clients, clarity, and confidence.
If your business runs on email, and growth is starting to strain response times or team capacity, this is a strong example of how AI can deliver immediate value when it’s embedded into the right workflow, with the right guardrails.
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