What an AI chatbot can and cannot do for a small business

We build these, and we run one on this website, so treat this as interested rather than neutral. It is still the most honest account of the thing you will read from someone selling it, because the fastest way to lose a client is to let them find the limits on their own.

What it genuinely does well

A chatbot on a small business website is good at exactly one job: answering the questions you have already answered a hundred times, instantly, at any hour.

Every small business has a list. Are you open Sunday. Do you deliver to my postcode. How much is a service. Do you do gluten free. Can I bring a dog. Do you take card. How long is the wait. How much is parking. The answers never change and you are tired of giving them.

That list is most of what customers want to know, and the common thread is timing. People ask at nine in the evening, on a Sunday, from the sofa, deciding between you and someone else. An answer then is worth a great deal more than the same answer at ten the next morning, by which point they have booked the other place.

What it does badly, or not at all

It cannot know anything you have not told it

A chatbot on your site is not plugged into your business. It knows what is written in its instructions and nothing else. If your prices changed in March and the file says February, it will cheerfully quote February.

This is the single biggest cause of chatbots going wrong, and it is a process problem, not a technology problem. Whoever builds it needs to tell you how it gets updated and whose job that is. If nobody can answer that, you will have a confidently out-of-date robot within a year.

It can be wrong, and the better ones admit it

These are language models. They are right the overwhelming majority of the time on straightforward factual questions drawn from a document, and occasionally they are confidently wrong. The way to manage that is to build it so it refuses rather than guesses: if the answer is not in the file, it says so and points the person at a human.

Ours is built that way deliberately, and it is worth understanding the trade. You get an assistant that sometimes says “I do not know, email us” — which feels like a failure but is not. A wrong price is far more expensive than no price.

It cannot take money

Not safely, and you do not want it to. Payment goes through a payment system with the usual protections. A chatbot gathers the enquiry; something else does the transaction.

It is not a receptionist

It will not chase a late delivery, placate an angry customer, or make a judgement call on a refund. Anything requiring discretion needs a person, and a well-built assistant hands those over early rather than fumbling through.

It will not fix a business problem

If people are not finding you, a chatbot does nothing — there is nobody there to talk to it. If people find you and leave because your prices are unclear, fix the prices. A chatbot on a site with no visitors is an expensive decoration.

What it actually costs to run

Less than people expect, and this is worth knowing before anyone quotes you a per-message price.

The computing behind one conversation — five or six exchanges — costs a fraction of a penny on a small, fast model, which is the right choice for answering questions from a document. A thousand conversations a month costs a pound or two. The cost of a chatbot is almost entirely the setting up and the keeping current, not the running.

So if someone quotes you per conversation, or a monthly fee that scales with messages, ask what the underlying cost is. There may be a good answer. There may not.

The five questions to ask anyone selling you one

• What does it do when it does not know? The right answer is “it says so and points them to you”. If the answer involves the word “creative”, walk away.
• Can I read what it has been told? You should be able to see the file your business was written into, and object to anything wrong in it.
• How does it get updated, and by whom? Prices change. Get this in writing.
• Can I see what people asked it? This is the most undersold benefit. The log of questions is a free, continuous piece of market research, and it will tell you things about your own customers you did not know.
• What happens to it if I stop paying? Usually it stops, which is fair, but you should know whether your website carries on working without it. Ours does — the site is yours, the assistant is the subscription.

Is it worth it for your business?

Honestly, it depends on one thing: do you get the same questions repeatedly, outside working hours, from people deciding whether to use you?

A restaurant, yes. A trade business covering a patch of postcodes, yes. A shop with sizing and delivery questions, yes. A consultancy with six clients who all have your mobile number, probably not — and we will tell you that on the call rather than sell you one.