Business Software Is Still Designed for Desks That No Longer Exist

01 /The Concept

Donna is an AI assistant for field sales reps – the kind who live in their cars, not at their desks.

The core problem: a field rep's day is a back-to-back sequence of client meetings. There's no good moment to sit down at a laptop, prep for the next visit, and log the results of the last one. The administrative overhead of a single meeting runs about 20 minutes. Multiply that by five to seven meetings a day and you've burned two hours that could have been another sales call. Push the CRM updates to the evening and half the details are already gone.

Donna lives in the rep's phone and handles all of that, working entirely within tools the rep already uses.

Here's a typical interaction flow.

The rep gets in the car to drive to a meeting. Donna sends a WhatsApp message – with a voice note – summarizing who the client is, what they wanted, and how the last meeting ended. The data comes from the calendar and the CRM.

When the calendar says the meeting should be wrapping up, Donna sends a follow-up message asking for a debrief.

The rep voice-records a quick summary – what happened, where things stand, what needs to happen next.

Donna analyzes the message and may ask targeted follow-up questions if something important is missing: "Did pricing come up?" The rep responds by voice, and Donna incorporates the additional detail.

Once Donna has the full picture, she pushes a text summary into the CRM and updates the relevant fields automatically – determining what changed based on the rep's messages.

She also drafts a follow-up email to the client and drops it into the rep's drafts folder. Whenever the rep has a free moment, they review it, tweak if needed, and send.

For video meetings, Donna can join directly and extract the key information from the conversation itself.

In more complex scenarios, Donna creates tasks for the rep or their colleagues, books follow-up meetings, and handles other downstream actions.

The result: administrative time per meeting drops from 20 minutes to roughly 5, freeing up enough time for one to two additional meetings per day – which the startup estimates translates to a 35% increase in deals closed.

Donna was founded in Belgium in late 2023. It has about 200 active users and has just raised its first round of €1.5M.

02 /Why It Matters

CRM hygiene is critical to sales performance, but most reps don't do it consistently – there's never enough time, and the work is genuinely tedious.

AI-assisted CRM updates are becoming table stakes. Paragon AI (formerly Pilot AI), a [recent review](/review/ne-nuzhno-pridumyvat-nuzhno-uspet) covered last year, raised $2.7M doing exactly this.

So the technology angle isn't novel. What's distinctive about Donna is the channel: it's built for the phone, not the browser. For a lot of people – especially field workers – the phone has already replaced the laptop as the primary work device.

That's a meaningful design constraint, not just a UI decision. Privyr, [covered here](/review/obrezat-i-zatochit), built a minimalist CRM purpose-designed for mobile use and raised $6.7M. The Mobile-First Company, [covered here](/review/strjomno-delat-stavku-tolko-na-odin-produkt), went further and built a full suite of mobile tools for small businesses that operate entirely from their phones – raising $3.5M at launch on that thesis.

Donna takes it one step further: there's no separate app to download. The assistant operates inside tools the rep already uses – WhatsApp, the calendar, the email client. That's not just a mobile strategy; it's a no-friction adoption strategy.

03 /Opportunities

B2C apps have been mobile-native for a decade. B2B software still largely treats the phone as a reduced version of the real product – a concession to users who don't have a computer nearby, not a first-class design target.

That assumption is increasingly wrong. Remote and hybrid work means "office worker" is a fuzzy category now. People work on trains, in cars, in coffee shops, in airports. Carrying a laptop everywhere just to handle a quick task is becoming unreasonable.

The opportunity is building B2B tools that are genuinely excellent on mobile – not adapted, but designed from the start for the phone. And as Donna shows, that sometimes means not building an app at all. The real interface is AI layered onto whatever the user already has on their phone.

That reframes the challenge considerably. You can't fit a full B2B product UI onto a small screen no matter how many mockups you draw. The only lever that actually works is AI – using it to mediate the interaction so the user gets what they need in the format that feels natural on mobile.

Which B2B tasks still require opening a laptop? Why can't they be done from a phone? What specifically doesn't work – what's impossible versus just inconvenient? How would you redesign the interaction using AI rather than simply redrawing the interface?

In B2B, the mobile revolution is just getting started.