Introduction

During our recent Turbotic hackathon, one submission stood out for its practical ambition and immediate business impact: the AI-Powered Business Autopilot, built solo by Mohammed Sahil. He tackled a problem every small sales org knows too well — slow, manual lead handling that lets opportunities go cold — and in a single weekend he proved how far automation can go when you stitch AI, telephony, and payments together inside a single workflow.

The Challenge

Slow lead follow-up is a universal growth killer. For many small sales teams and service businesses, new inquiries pile up in the CRM while people juggle emails, calendars, and manual payment steps. By the time someone reaches out, prospects have cooled off or moved on, and the whole operation becomes a game of triage: who can chase the hottest leads before they get cold? That’s expensive — in lost conversions, wasted time, and in the mental load it places on teams that should be doing higher-value work.

At our hackathon, Mohammed Sahil tackled exactly this pain. He saw an opportunity to automate the entire inquiry → engagement → payment flow so that every new lead gets a timely, consistent response without manual intervention. The goal was ambitious but simple: cut response times from hours to minutes, automate scheduling and payment capture, and make the whole pipeline reliable enough to run 24/7 without adding headcount. In short: turn lead handling into a self-operating business autopilot.

This is a problem that doesn’t need another partial fix. Many tools stitch bits together — a form here, a webhook there — but the friction lives in orchestration: deciding what to do with a lead, triggering the right channel (call, SMS, email), collecting payment if needed, and notifying the human team only when human judgment is required. Mohammed’s challenge was to prove that a single, AI-assisted workflow could coordinate all of that end-to-end.

The Implementation

What Mohamed built is refreshingly straightforward and smart in how it chooses the right tools for each task. Using Turbotic Automation AI as the orchestration layer, he created an automated pipeline that runs on a ten-minute cadence and handles everything from qualification to payment.

The core steps are:

• Polling the lead source. The workflow checks the company’s lead database every ten minutes and pulls any new inquiries into the pipeline. This cadence strikes a balance between real-time responsiveness and cost/compute efficiency.
• AI qualification. Each incoming lead is fed to an OpenAI model that analyzes the inquiry, extracts intent and key details (product interest, urgency, contact preferences), and recommends the next action. This is where natural language understanding turns a messy message into structured data.
• Engagement orchestration. Based on the AI’s output, the workflow triggers communications through Twilio — outbound voice calls and SMS — to engage the prospect, propose meeting times, or deliver next steps. When human scheduling is required, the workflow automates calendar polling and confirms slots via SMS/email.
• Payment processing. If the workflow and qualification indicate a paid transaction, the process hands off to Razorpay to capture payment securely, then records the transaction and sends a confirmation email via SendGrid.
• Notifications and escalation. The pipeline notifies the internal team when a high-value lead needs human follow-up, and logs every event for auditing and analytics.

Mohammed was able to sketch, wire up, and test this pipeline during the hackathon. He used Turbotic’s conversational building experience to define the decision logic, and connected the external services through standard APIs so each step handed the baton to the next. Limited Twilio credits meant a fully scaled voice demo was constrained, but the prototype worked end-to-end and was repeatable — exactly what a rapid prototype should prove.

Critically, this design keeps humans out of routine loops while preserving human oversight for edge cases. The AI handles classification and routine exchanges; payments and scheduling are automated; humans step in only when the outcome requires judgment or negotiation. That sensible blend is what makes the system useful in the real world.

The Achievements

The results from the hackathon prototype are promising in both business impact and product validation. Mohammed’s autopilot showed that you can move from idea to working pipeline in hours, not weeks — a testament to the speed Turbotic enables for prototyping complex multi-system automations.

From a business perspective, the key achievements are:

• Faster engagement. Prospects can be contacted within minutes of submitting an inquiry instead of hours or days, dramatically improving the odds of conversion. Faster responses typically translate into higher lead-to-opportunity ratios and better customer perception.
• Reduced manual overhead. The workflow eliminates many routine tasks — follow-ups, scheduling coordination, and initial payment capture — freeing team members to focus on higher-value activities like closing deals or servicing complex customers.
• 24/7 coverage. Because it runs on a schedule, the pipeline provides continuous outreach, which is especially important for businesses operating across time zones or for leads that come outside business hours.
• Repeatable, adaptable template. Although built as a hackathon prototype, the design is inherently modular: swap in a different CRM connector, replace Razorpay with another payment provider, or adjust the AI prompts to match a different vertical. That makes it a strong candidate for adoption and further refinement.
• Proof of rapid prototyping. Perhaps most importantly for Turbotic, this submission validates the platform’s core promise: teams can assemble production-grade automations quickly by combining AI with existing SaaS services, without heavy engineering lift.

If you’re excited by what’s possible when AI meets automation, come join our Discord community — a welcoming space where builders, problem-solvers, and curious minds share ideas, swap templates, and help each other turn experiments into impact. Whether you’re prototyping your first workflow or scaling automations across an organization, you’ll find practical help, honest feedback, and people who love building the future of work. Jump in, share what you’re working on, and let’s create something remarkable together.