Where AI assistants actually help, and where they are just cost
Over the past two years almost every business has been asked whether it wants an AI assistant. Some of those projects are money out the window, and some are among the most useful things you can do with a software budget. The difference is predictable.
The test
An AI assistant is worth it when there are many questions with few distinct answers.
If your customers ask hundreds of questions a month and those boil down to fifteen topics with clear answers, an assistant will do real work. If every question is a separate case requiring judgement, the assistant will sound confident and be wrong, and the mistake will carry your name.
The most common mistake: an assistant on the front door
The usual impulse is to put the chatbot on the landing page so it can “absorb” all enquiries. That is the place where it has the least context and the most ways to be wrong.
Far more useful are the places deeper in the product, where the assistant knows who it is talking to and what state their account is in. An assistant that can see the specific order is useful. An assistant that greets every visitor is mostly noise.
Internal uses are underrated
The most reliable return is often where no customer is looking: searching internal documentation, summarising long email threads, filling in drafts from a template, classifying incoming enquiries before a person looks at them.
These tasks share one property: somebody checks the result before it reaches a customer. That changes the cost of a mistake at its foundations, and it is why internal uses make a good first step.
What to settle before you build
Before development it is worth having an answer to three questions: which questions the assistant will not take, what the handover to a human looks like, and what happens when it does not know. An assistant that says “I do not know, let me put you through to a colleague” is a better product than one that always has an answer.
And one thing that often gets missed: if the assistant processes user data, that belongs in your privacy policy. Not as a formality, as a requirement.
In short
Ask not “can we add AI” but “which repeated question costs us the most time”. If the answer is specific, there is something to build. If it is not, wait.
Have a question like that on repeat? Tell us about it.