People do not type one message. They type six.
Pilota per Sempre is a flight school that has been running since 1981. Enquiries arrive on WhatsApp, the way everything in Italy arrives on WhatsApp. We built the agent that answers them — and the least glamorous part of it turned out to be the part that made it work.
- Sector
- Flight school · founded 1981
- Built as
- CTO, Prisma Group
- Shipped
- 2026 · moved to client infrastructure June 2026
- Channel
- Their site
- pilotapersempre.it
The enquiries were the same. The answers had to be right.
A flight school gets asked the same things constantly: what licences do you run, how long does it take, what does it cost, do I need a medical, when does the next course start. All answerable, all worth answering quickly, and all arriving at hours when nobody is in the office.
The catch is that some of those answers are regulated, and being casually wrong about what a licence permits is not the same as being wrong about opening hours.
The hard part was not the answers. It was the typing.
Nobody writes one well-formed question on WhatsApp. They write "hi", then "i wanted to ask", then "about the ppl course", then "is it possible in the evenings", four messages in fifteen seconds.
A naive agent replies to each of those as if it were a complete thought. The person then gets four answers — one to "hi", one to half a question — while they are still typing the real one. The conversation becomes unusable within about twenty seconds, and no amount of work on the answers fixes it.
So the fix went in before anything else: the system buffers incoming messages and waits for a pause that suggests the person has finished, then treats the burst as one message and replies once. It is invisible when it works, which is the point.
Two workflows, then a move onto their own machine.
Small system, with a clear line between the part that decides when to answer and the part that decides what to say.
- 01
The buffer
Incoming messages are held and grouped. When the typing stops, the burst is passed on as one input. Everything downstream gets a whole question instead of a fragment.
- 02
The agent
Answers from the school's own material on courses, licences, timings and costs, and hands over to a person for anything it does not cover rather than improvising.
- 03
Moved onto their own server
It started on a shared machine and was moved onto one belonging to the school, with a firewall and its own security certificates. The whole setup is written down as scripts, so it can be rebuilt exactly rather than from somebody's memory.
- 04
It updates itself
A scheduled job keeps the automation platform current, and the configuration is backed up on a rotation. The school does not have a system administrator, so the system looks after itself.
Handover documentation, migration June 2026.
Most of the work was in the pause before the answer.