What an AI assistant on your website can and can't do

If you run a clinic, a café or a shop, you've probably wondered whether one would help, and also whether it might say something embarrassing to a customer.

Both feelings are reasonable. A well-built assistant can take a real load off you. A badly built one can make things up with total confidence. Here's what I think a good one can do today, what it shouldn't do, and what it costs, in plain terms.

What a good assistant can do

Answer from your own information

The most useful kind of assistant doesn't answer from "the internet." It answers from documents you give it: your FAQ page, your price list, your cancellation policy, your menu, your opening hours.

When a customer asks "Do you do gluten-free cakes?" or "What's your cancellation fee?", the assistant first finds the parts of your documents that mention it, then writes a short, friendly answer based only on those parts. The technical name for this is retrieval, which just means "look it up first, then answer."

It's a good fit for the questions you answer over and over: hours, parking, prices, how returns work. The answers already exist. Customers just don't read them.

Show where the answer came from

A good assistant shows its source with each answer, like "From: Cancellation policy," with a link to the exact passage. Customers can check it, and you can see whether it used the right document.

Say "I don't know"

This is the most important feature, and the one generic chatbots get wrong. If your documents don't cover a question, the right answer is "I don't have information about that," not a confident guess.

AI models are built to produce a plausible answer, and if nothing stops them, they'll fill gaps with something that sounds right. A well-built assistant is set up to refuse when it can't find support in your documents. When you test one, ask it things your documents don't cover and see what happens.

Hand off to a person

When the assistant can't help, or the customer simply wants a human, it should make that easy: your phone number, a contact form, or a "Talk to a person" link. The goal isn't to stop people reaching you. It's to answer the easy questions so the ones that reach you are the ones that need you.

What it shouldn't do

• Give medical, legal or financial advice. A vet or physio clinic's assistant can explain how booking works and what a first visit involves. It should not tell someone whether their dog's symptoms are serious. It should point them to call you.
• Make promises your policies don't. Refunds, discounts, exceptions: an assistant shouldn't invent them. If it isn't written in your documents, it shouldn't say it.
• Take payments or change bookings on its own. It can link to your booking or ordering page. The actual booking should happen in a system built for that.
• Pretend to be a person. Customers should know they're talking to an assistant.

Privacy, in plain terms

When a customer types a question, that text is sent to an AI provider to produce the answer. A few things are worth knowing:

• Only put public information in its documents. Your FAQ and policies are fine. Customer records, staff details and anything private are not.
• Read the provider's terms. The major providers say that data sent through their business services isn't used to train their models by default, but check the current terms for the one you use.
• Discourage personal details. A short note like "Please don't share health or payment details here" helps, and the assistant can be told to steer people to a phone call for anything sensitive.

What it costs

There are usually two parts.

• Setting it up: preparing your documents, connecting the assistant, testing it with real questions (including the awkward ones), and adding it to your site. This is a one-time cost.
• Running it: each answer costs a small amount from the AI provider, generally a fraction of a cent to a few cents per question, depending on the model and how long your documents and answers are. For a small business answering a modest number of questions a day, the monthly bill is usually small. Questions that clearly have nothing to do with your business can be filtered out before they reach the model, so they cost nothing.

Keep your documents up to date and the assistant stays up to date too.

Is it worth it for you?

If you or your staff answer the same handful of questions every day, by phone, email or DM, an assistant can probably save you real time. If most of your questions are one-off and complicated, a good FAQ page and a clear contact form might serve you better.

If you want to see what this looks like, I built a website support bot that answers from a business's own documents, shows its sources, and offers a human when it doesn't know. If you'd like one for your own business, details are on my AI assistants for your website page, and I'm happy to tell you honestly whether it's a good fit.