How much time did it take to build a custom internal AI/automation system (using Air Table, apps, and AI) for managing client work?

There's no set number of hours for total setup time. The system started as using Zapier for automations, which led to discovering Zapier Tables, which then led to adopting Air Table as a better database platform. An internal portal/app was built starting officially at the end of last year to house tax return status, bookkeeping status, leads, and client communications all in one place, since Air Table's UI wasn't the smoothest for actually working through things. The build has been ongoing and iterative — roughly a few hours a week spent tweaking and updating — driven by continuously finding new use cases (tax board, then bookkeeping board, then leads board, then communications). Initial setup wasn't too hard because ChatGPT (and more recently Claude, used for about a month) was used to generate the prompts needed to build it out.