A quarter of the requests I received last year started with “let’s put an AI assistant on my site”. For most businesses that is a sound idea — but if you don’t decide which work it takes over before you install it, all you get is a toy that annoys customers.
Which questions does an AI assistant take over?
Most of the questions a business receives repeat themselves: opening hours, price range, availability, delivery status, address. These have a known answer from a known source — and that is exactly the assistant’s job.
- Fixed information such as hours, address and price range
- Availability and directing people to booking
- Order or service status lookups (when connected to your system)
- Frequently asked questions and product comparisons
- A first reply to messages arriving outside working hours, and a record of them
Where a human is needed
Complaints, returns, negotiation and technical diagnosis belong to people. A well-built assistant hands the conversation to you the moment it recognises those topics; it does not fall into an “I didn’t understand” loop. Setting one up without writing the handover rule is the mistake I see most often.
What a proper setup looks like
- The assistant answers only from your data; it is not allowed to invent
- When it does not know the answer, it directs the person to WhatsApp or the form
- Every conversation is logged and reviewed once a week
- On sensitive matters such as price it gives a range, never a firm commitment
- If personal data is collected, the visitor is informed as the law requires
An assistant is not measured by how many questions it answers, but by how many customers it gets to the right place.
The cost side
There are two items: setup and usage. Setup means gathering the content and connecting the assistant to your own data. Usage is a small fee per message; for a business with a hundred conversations a day, the monthly cost stays below a single lost customer.
Getting started
The first step is not choosing technology; it is writing the twenty most frequent questions on one page. With that page an assistant is set up in a week — without it, it gets discussed for months.
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