Part A · before DMA's 21 sections
How DMA AI works
The parts every capability relies on: the AI agents, the tools they may call, the rules that decide what they may do, the write gate into Nutshell, the gateway every AI call goes through, the database, and security. Each section page links back here under “Powered by”.
| No. | Topic | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| A.1 | The big picture | DMA's book describes one AI sales brain on top of Nutshell: an inbound engine (the website salesperson), a reactivation engine for the 30,000 existing records, zero-entry CRM for the team, AI-led closing, and a human escalation control plane, with won and lost outcomes feeding back into scoring. |
| A.2 | The AI workers and their autonomy | DMA's book rates every capability on five autonomy levels: observe, recommend, prepare and wait for approval, act within rules, and autonomous. The AI is the default operator; people step in on defined exceptions. |
| A.3 | Tools, split by risk | DMA's book lets the AI run the website conversation on its own, while anything that changes data, contacts a person or commits DMA follows the autonomy levels and guardrails. |
| A.4 | The rule engine | DMA's book lets the AI act on its own by default, inside DMA-approved guardrails, and hands a deal to Josh on seven defined conditions: a new deal-size tier, non-standard terms, a payment problem, a request for a person, low confidence, a refund or cancellation, or no approved precedent. |
| A.5 | The write gate: one door to Nutshell | DMA's book keeps Nutshell as the single system of record: every AI-run or human-run interaction writes itself back through approved API writes (summaries, fields, tasks, follow-ups), with Nutshell's own AI left off. |
| A.6 | The AI gateway and observability | DMA's book asks for AI cost, traceability and decision observability: every AI decision traceable and costed, so the system can be debugged and audited, including the after-the-fact sampling of deals the AI closed on its own. |
| A.7 | The bridge database: one memory | DMA's book asks for a two-way Nutshell connection, an AI review of all 30,000 records, and an Account Digital Twin: one living picture of each account that every part of the system reads from. |
| A.8 | Security, approvals and control | DMA's book asks for approvals where DMA wants a person (with human override always available), consent and suppression policies before any customer-facing autonomy, safe deliverability, and governance over what the AI may write to the CRM. |
| A.9 | One message, end to end | DMA's book describes the inbound path in one line: a new visitor, an AI conversation, qualification, a score, the right sales approach, Nutshell, then an AI-led close or a hand-off to a person. |