The autonomy dial is the setting that decides how far Point goes without you. It is held separately for each kind of work rather than once for the whole assistant, it runs from suggest only, through review, to handled outright, and every kind of work starts on review until you move it yourself.
- The unit is a kind of work, because “how much do you trust an assistant” has no answer and “how much on filing” has an easy one.
- The two lower positions differ in how much of the job is already done when it reaches you, not in how much you decide.
- Where a setting belongs is decided by two questions about your own firm: if this goes wrong, who sees it, and can the wrong version be taken back.
- At the top of a setting Point stops checking in. That is what the top is for, and it changes how you find out what happened.
What the dial actually sets
Three positions, and each one describes a different amount of finished work arriving at your desk.
Suggest only. Point works out what it would do and shows you. Sorting a message, drafting a reply, proposing a time: you see the recommendation, and the doing stays with you. Nothing has happened yet.
Review. Point does the work and holds the result until you say yes. The reply is written in your words, the meeting time is found, the ask buried in paragraph four has become a dated task, and none of it has committed to anything until you agree. Every kind of work sits here on a new account. How saying yes actually works, and what happens the first time Point wants to do something it has not done before, is approving anything new before it acts.
Handled outright. Point completes that kind of work and does not come back to you about it. There is no preview to read and no queue to clear, because clearing a queue is the work you were hoping to hand over.
Notice what separates the bottom two. It is not how much you decide, since you decide in both. It is how much of the work is already finished when the decision reaches you. At suggest only, agreeing still leaves you the job. At review, agreeing is the job. That is why review rather than suggest only is the sensible place for everything to start: it is the position where the assistant is genuinely working and nothing has left your hands.
Why the unit is a kind of work
Because the question people arrive with cannot be answered in the form they ask it. How much do you trust AI with your inbox has no answer, since your inbox is not one job. It is filing, and reading, and remembering, and answering, and those are as different from each other as filing a receipt is from signing a letter.
A single switch across all of it would end up set by whichever kind of work worries you most. That is the real cost of one control, and it is not extra risk. It is everything the assistant could have safely taken off you, held back by the one thing you are not ready to hand over. The sorting waits on the client reply. Your quietest, most reversible work gets governed by your worst case, forever.
Split it per kind of work and each part gets an honest answer rather than a compromise. It also means the parts move at their own speed. Scheduling can reach the top of its setting in a fortnight while replies to clients stay on review for good, and a dial permanently split like that is a correctly configured one, not a setup somebody abandoned half way through.
Where each setting belongs
Two questions, asked about your firm rather than about the software.
If this kind of work goes wrong, who sees it? And can the wrong version be taken back?
Filing and ranking answer cheaply on both. A misfiled thread is seen by you and nobody else, and putting it back is one movement. That is why sorting is usually the first thing owners stop supervising, often within days.
A reply to a client answers expensively on both. Somebody outside your firm reads it, and their impression of your practice is formed before you know there was a mistake. Nothing recalls a message once it has been delivered, because it is no longer on any system you control. This is the setting most owners leave on review permanently, and there is nothing timid about that.
Scheduling is the interesting middle. A client does see the result, so the first answer is expensive. But a booked hour is a fact rather than a judgment about their affairs, and moving it costs one short message. Point runs the whole back and forth to get there, which is a genuine errand rather than an opinion, and that combination is why it tends to be the first thing raised to the top.
Move one setting at a time. Not out of caution, but because two at once makes the next surprise ambiguous, and you want to know which change produced it. The order to work through in your first fortnight belongs to your first two weeks with Point; the reasoning above is what makes any order defensible.
What changes at the top
You stop being consulted, which is the entire benefit and worth saying without softening. A setting at the top means that kind of work happens while you are with a client, or asleep, and the first you hear of it is afterwards.
So the thing that tells you what happened changes. Below the top, the preview is the record: you saw it because you approved it. At the top there is no preview, and the activity log behind every action becomes the only place the work is visible. Raising a setting and reading that log are the same decision made twice, and anyone who raises the first without ever opening the second has not delegated the work, only stopped watching it.
Raising a setting is also not an accuracy improvement. The judgment Point brings to a kind of work is the same at every position on the dial; what changes is whether there is a step where you would have caught a bad one. So the dial is the wrong instrument for finding out whether the judgment is good. Watch it at review first, which is what whether you can trust AI email triage sets out how to do, and raise the setting because you already know the answer.
Where the dial stops
The dial governs what Point does on its own. Four things sit outside it, and each of them is a different control or none at all.
What has already happened. Lowering a setting takes effect for everything that follows and reaches nothing behind it. Work completed while the setting was high stays completed. Putting a particular action back is a separate move, covered in undoing what Point did, and it covers Point’s side of the line only.
What other people do with what was sent. A delivered message belongs to whoever received it. No position on any dial, in any product, changes that.
Which mailbox this is about. The dial answers how far, on this kind of work. It has nothing to say about keeping the mail of two firms you run out of each other’s way, which is keeping one business isolated from another.
What the vendor does with your data. Where mail is stored, who else processes it and how long any of it is kept are answered by a supplier, not by a setting in your account. The list worth putting to any of them is in questions to ask any AI tool about your data.
If you are reading all this because handing any of it over feels premature rather than because you want the switch, the honest starting point is learning to trust AI with client work, which takes the same ground from the other end.
Common questions
Does Point send email without me?
At the top of the setting for replies, yes, and that is what the top of that setting means. Out of the box replies sit on review, so the words are prepared and the sending is yours. Read the question as one about configuration rather than about the product, because that is what it is: the answer is whatever you have that one setting on today, and you can check it in a moment.
What is the difference between suggest only and review?
How much of the work is already done when it reaches you. Suggest only tells you what Point would do and leaves you to do it. Review means it is done and waiting on your agreement. The amount of control is identical. The amount of your morning it consumes is not, which is why the middle position rather than the bottom one is where a new account starts.
Can I turn a setting back down?
Yes, immediately, and it applies to everything from that moment on. What it will not do is rewrite the afternoon that has already happened. That asymmetry is worth holding onto: the setting is always reversible, and individual actions taken under it are reversible to different degrees. Point’s own moves can be put back from the log. A message that reached its recipient cannot.
Should everything end up at the top eventually?
No, and treating the dial as a ladder to climb is the most common way to misread it. Filing at the top and client replies on review is a stable, deliberate arrangement, not a job left half done. The settings are there to be different from each other. If they were all going to end in the same place there would be no reason to hold them apart.
Who in the firm can change it?
The dial belongs to the person whose mailbox it governs, which is a different arrangement from a system where an administrator sets an organisation’s automation level. It also means the setting is a fact about your firm that is worth writing down somewhere, because it is the answer you will need when a client, an insurer or a professional body asks how far your tools go.
The short version
The dial is one question asked several times rather than once: not how much you trust an assistant, but how far Point should go on this kind of work, given who sees it when it goes wrong and whether the wrong version can be taken back. Everything starts on review, where the work is done and nothing has committed. Raise the settings you have watched long enough to stop reading, one at a time, and lower any of them the moment you would rather not. The benefits page is the full inventory of what there is to hand over, and Point is what the dial is set inside.