Q&A › AI & automation
Where automation genuinely saves hours, where it quietly costs you customers, and what it does not do.
AI is being sold to small businesses the way websites were in 2005. Some of it is genuinely useful. A lot of it is a chatbot that annoys people.
Three things reliably: answer the phone or messages outside hours, draft routine writing you then edit, and sort or summarise information faster than a person. What it does not do is replace judgement, and it should not be making decisions nobody checks.
Only if it answers questions better than your page does. A bot that exists to collect an email address before helping is worse than no bot. If the three questions everyone asks are answered clearly on the page, you may not need one at all.
Software that answers calls, holds a normal conversation, and takes a booking or a message. It is genuinely useful for businesses whose hands are busy — a salon mid-service, a contractor on a roof. It should always offer a route to a human.
It will write something. Whether you should publish it is a different question: generated copy tends to be fluent, generic and occasionally wrong about your own business. Useful as a first draft to react to, risky as the finished article.
Google's stated position is that it judges the content, not how it was produced. In practice, mass-produced generic pages do get caught by the spam policies. Writing that reflects something only you know is safe regardless of the tool used to draft it.
When an AI states something false with complete confidence. It matters because a customer-facing bot can invent a price, a policy or an opening time, and you will be held to it. Anything facing customers needs its facts constrained to a source you control.
Usually a small amount per conversation or per thousand words, which adds up with volume. The larger cost is setup and the ongoing checking. Be wary of anything quoted as a flat monthly fee with no mention of usage — the usage is still being paid by someone.
Complaints, refunds, anything medical or legal, and the first contact with a high-value customer. The rule of thumb: if getting it wrong costs you more than the time it saves, a person should do it.
It depends entirely on the provider and the plan. Some train on what you send, some contractually do not. Before putting customer details into any tool, find the sentence in its terms that says what happens to them — and if you cannot find it, assume the worst.
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