The autonomy dial sets how far Point goes on its own. You hold one for each kind of work, so filing and client replies get answered separately. It runs from suggest only, through review, to handled outright. Every kind of work starts on review, and it stays there until you move it yourself.
- The unit is a kind of work. “How much do you trust an assistant” has no answer. “How much on filing” has an easy one.
- The two lower positions both leave the decision with you. They differ in how much of the job is already done when it reaches you.
- Two questions about your own firm place each setting: if this goes wrong, who sees it, and can the wrong version be taken back?
- At the top, Point stops checking in with you. That’s 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. You see the recommendation for sorting a message, drafting a reply, or proposing a time. 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 is already a dated task. All of it waits for your agreement. Every kind of work sits here on a new account. How saying yes works, and what happens the first time Point wants to try something new, is approving anything new before it acts.
Handled outright. Point completes that kind of work and moves on. There’s no preview to read and no queue to clear, because clearing a queue is the work you were hoping to hand over.
Look at what separates the bottom two. You decide in both. What changes is how much of the work is finished when the decision reaches you. At suggest only, agreeing still leaves you the job. At review, agreeing is the job. That’s why everything starts on review. It’s the position where Point is genuinely working and the result is still in your hands.
Why the unit is a kind of work
The question people arrive with is hard to answer in the form they ask it. How much do you trust AI with your inbox? Your inbox is several jobs at once, so the question has no single answer. It’s filing, and reading, and remembering, and answering. Filing a receipt and signing a letter sit that far apart.
One switch across all of it ends up set by whichever kind of work worries you most. The cost of that shows up as lost help rather than added risk. Everything Point could safely take off you sits held back by the one thing you’d rather keep. 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. The parts also move at their own speed. Scheduling can reach the top of its setting in two weeks while replies to clients stay on review for good. A dial left permanently split like that is a correctly configured one, and it’s finished work.
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. You’re the only one who sees a misfiled thread, and putting it back is one movement. That’s 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. Their impression of your practice forms before you hear about the mistake. Once a message is delivered it sits on a system you don’t control, so it stays delivered. Most owners leave this one on review for good, and that’s a sound call.
Scheduling is the interesting middle. A client does see the result, so the first answer is expensive. 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 makes it a genuine errand rather than an opinion. That combination is why scheduling tends to be the first thing raised to the top.
Move one setting at a time. The reason is attribution: two at once leaves the next surprise ambiguous, and you want to know which change produced it. The order to work through is in your first two weeks with Point. The reasoning above is what makes any order defensible.
What changes at the top
You stop being consulted. That’s the entire benefit, and it’s worth saying plainly. A setting at the top means that kind of work happens while you’re with a client, or asleep. You hear about it 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’s no preview, so 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. Delegating the work means doing both.
Here’s the one thing worth correcting, because it costs something to get wrong. Raising a setting isn’t 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’s a step where you’d 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. 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 one answers to a different control, or to none.
What has already happened. Lowering a setting takes effect for everything that follows. Work completed while the setting was high stays completed. Putting a particular action back is a separate move, covered in undoing what Point did. That covers Point’s side of the line.
What other people do with what was sent. A delivered message belongs to whoever received it. That holds at every position on every dial, in any product.
Which mailbox this is about. The dial answers how far, on this kind of work. Keeping the mail of two firms you run out of each other’s way is a separate control, and it’s keeping one business isolated from another.
What the vendor does with your data. A supplier answers where mail is stored, who else processes it and how long any of it is kept. Those sit outside the settings in your account. The list worth putting to any of them is in questions to ask any AI tool about your data.
Maybe you’re reading all this because handing any of it over feels premature, rather than because you want the switch. Then 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’s what the top of that setting means. Out of the box, replies sit on review, so Point prepares the words and you press send. Read the question as one about configuration rather than about the product, because that’s 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 the doing to you. Review means it’s done and waiting on your agreement. You hold the same control either way. What differs is how much of your morning it takes, and that’s why a new account starts on the middle position.
Can I turn a setting back down?
Yes, immediately, and it applies to everything from that moment on. The afternoon that has already happened stays as it is. 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 go back from the log. A message that reached its recipient stays with the recipient.
Should everything end up at the top eventually?
No, and reading the dial as a ladder to climb is the most common way to misread it. Filing at the top with client replies on review is a stable, deliberate arrangement. The settings are there to be different from each other. If they were all going to end in the same place, one switch would do.
Who in the firm can change it?
The dial belongs to the person whose mailbox it governs. That’s a different arrangement from a system where an administrator sets an organization’s automation level. It also makes the setting a fact about your firm, and one worth writing down somewhere. It’s the answer you’ll 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. How far should Point 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 the result waits for you. Raise the settings you’ve watched long enough to stop reading, one at a time. Lower any of them the moment you want the step back. The benefits page is the full inventory of what there is to hand over, and Point is what the dial is set inside.