Every shop eventually needs a form. Client intake for a hair salon. Post-appointment feedback. Waiver for a fitness class. Allergies for a restaurant. Pet history for a grooming shop.
And every shop, until this month, built those forms the same way: one field at a time, in a form builder UI, clicking add field, choose type, type the label, mark as required, add options for the dropdown, repeat. Twenty minutes of clicking to produce a form that could have been described in one sentence.
The sentence
That one sentence is what we obsessed over. What if the shop owner just wrote it, and the AI built the form?
"New client intake for my hair salon: name, phone, preferred stylist, hair type, allergies, how they heard about us."
That sentence should produce a six-field form. Each field should have the right type (EMAIL for email, PHONE for phone, SELECT with sensible options for preferred stylist, TEXTAREA for allergies). Required fields should be marked required. The form name should be something sensible.
All of that takes an LLM about 2 seconds to do if you give it the right schema.
The technical bit
Under the hood, the AI form generator sends the prompt to a model with a strict Zod schema describing the form shape. The model returns a structured object that maps 1:1 to the Pounds FormField type. We validate it, pass it into the existing form builder as pre-filled state, and let the shop owner tweak anything they don't like.
The interesting engineering decision was what to show the user during the 2 seconds the model is thinking. We tested three options:
- A spinner. Felt slow.
- A progress bar. Felt fake.
- A set of typing-indicator dots with the text "Designing your form…". Felt magical.
Option 3 won. Perception of speed beats actual speed.
The free plan compromise
AI generation is not free. Every prompt costs us a real API call. But we didn't want to gate the feature completely behind Pro, because the whole point is to let a new shop owner experience the magic on day one before they've committed to anything.
Our compromise: 3 lifetime generations on Free. Enough to try it, enough to build the forms you actually need on a small shop. Pro gets unlimited.
We watched the data closely for a few weeks after launch. The conversion rate from "used AI form" to "upgraded to Pro" is about 4× the conversion rate from "didn't use AI form" — which is exactly what you'd hope. The feature sells itself.
The pattern we think generalizes
There's a bigger lesson buried in this. A lot of admin UI is just a way for software to ask the user to do structured data entry. And LLMs are good at structured data entry. Any tool where the user builds a thing field by field is a candidate for "describe it in English instead."
Our roadmap has four more features being rebuilt this way: reward catalog builder, email campaign composer, service setup wizard, and customer segmentation rules. Each one is currently 5–20 minutes of clicking. Each one could be 10 seconds of typing.
We'll ship them one at a time. If there's a specific admin flow in Pounds that drives you crazy and you wish you could just describe instead of click, email hello@pounds.network and tell us. We'll move it up the list.