Gus de Souza - Portfolio

AI FeatureSaaSStudy Case

Smart Assistant

An in-product AI assistant for ecoPortal's web platform

Tools: Figma and Claude Code

Context

ecoPortal's web platform is where safety officers, site managers and frontline staff run their daily work: reporting incidents, investigating hazards and closing out audits. The workflows are dense and multi-step, and moving through them quickly has always depended on deep product knowledge that most occasional users never build.

The problem

The platform rewarded expertise and offered everyone else static documentation. An assistant that answers inside the page was the obvious opportunity, but these users were meeting AI for the first time: curious about it, unsure whether to trust it, unclear on what it could do, and cautious of getting it wrong in work that feeds compliance and real-world risk. The research made the risk concrete. Only 26% of people trust AI, and 60% never send a first message at all. A capable assistant nobody knows how to start with is one nobody uses.

My role

I treated this as product design rather than screen design, deciding what the assistant would say, when it would speak, what it would not claim to know, and how it would fail. Its capabilities were still being defined while the design was in progress, so I built flexible patterns that could absorb decisions made later without going back to square one. Instead of a blank input I designed contextual suggestion chips that surface what is possible, and a thumbs up and down on every answer so the organisation could tell whether it was helping.

Business impact

Answers now arrive inside the page a user is already working in, rather than through a support ticket or a search through static documentation. Repetitive "how do I do this" questions make up the bulk of Tier 1 support in SaaS products, and in-product assistants typically deflect 40% to 45% of them. Contextual suggestions give occasional users a confident starting point, and the feedback signal turns support demand into a read on which workflows confuse people and where the documentation gaps sit.

ecoPortal is a configurable enterprise software company that provides a centralized platform to support workplace health, safety, and environmental risk management.

Showcase Case study

ecoPortal is a configurable enterprise software company that provides a centralized platform to support workplace health, safety, and environmental risk management.