Custom AI assistants for small business
A general chatbot knows everything about the world and nothing about your business. A custom assistant knows your prices, your paperwork and how you answer the awkward questions.
What a custom assistant is
I build assistants on the Claude API with your own material behind them: your quotes, your price list, your service manuals, your safety documents, your past email replies, whatever is the real source of truth in your business. When someone asks a question, the assistant answers from that material rather than from a guess.
They sit wherever the question gets asked. On your website as a chat window. On SMS, so a customer or a subcontractor can text a number and get an answer. Or internally, as a tool your staff use to stop asking you the same thing every week.
The important part is what happens when it doesn't know. It says it doesn't know, takes the person's details, and hands the question to me or to you. It does not invent a price, a warranty term or a delivery date. That single rule is the difference between an assistant that helps and one that creates a problem you have to apologise for.
Where people put them
- Customer-facing website chat that answers real product and service questions, not a canned FAQ.
- An internal assistant over your policies and procedures, so staff stop interrupting you.
- A quoting helper that drafts a quote from a job description using your own rate card.
- An onboarding assistant for new staff that answers the first-week questions.
- A supplier or trade-account assistant on SMS for stock and lead-time questions.
- A document assistant that reads long specs and pulls out what matters to your job.
How I build them
First we agree on scope: what it should answer, and just as importantly what it must always hand over. Then I gather your source material and put it into a form the model can search reliably, so answers come with something behind them rather than being conjured.
I write and test the behaviour against a list of real questions, including the awkward ones — the complaint, the price haggle, the question about a service you don't offer. You see the transcripts before it goes anywhere near a customer. Once it's live, I keep an eye on the conversations for the first few weeks and tighten anything that reads badly.
Everything runs in your accounts where it can. You are never locked into a platform I control, and if you want to take it in-house later, the setup and the documentation come with you.
From $1,500 +GST.
Scope and volume set the final figure, quoted before any work starts. Claude API usage is billed at cost, typically small for a single-operator business.
All prices AUD and exclude GST.