Chatbots, AI assistants, and virtual receptionists are readily available for small and medium-sized businesses.
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Ask any small business owner about AI, and they'll likely say they're interested. But are they really using it? No, not yet. There is still a lot of mistrust and questions about the capabilities, reliability, and security of AI. Meanwhile, most large companies ignored these concerns and spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing their own AI applications, most of which were unsuccessful.
All the experts say that AI will change everything about how we live and do business. But it's still early days. However, if you're looking to invest in AI next year, there are three types of applications you can use in your business that will give you peace of mind that they actually work.
Virtual assistant AI
I recently wrote about a company called Slang.AI that provides voice-enabled virtual hosts that answer restaurant phones and book table reservations. it works. Voice technology works. Most of us have a decent amount of experience calling large corporations, hotels, airlines, and telecommunications companies for customer service and being able to connect with a bot. The technology is advanced enough to truly understand callers and respond to their needs.
For that, you should consider RingCentral, ConnexAI, Smith.AI, and JustCall. All of these platforms offer virtual assistants to replace receptionists. The voices used on these platforms are very human-like, but like any AI bot, they can be easily passed off as bots. it doesn't matter. My smartest clients have set up these virtual receptionists to instantly recognize themselves as virtual receptionists and give callers the option to speak to a human. When it comes to basic tasks like transferring to voice mail, receiving messages, and answering simple questions, these virtual assistants can perform them.
My clients who use these tell me that more and more callers prefer asking questions and getting faster responses from virtual assistants than from humans. Some people prefer humans, and that's okay too. But don't fire your receptionist. These assistants can take work away from office workers, freeing them up to do more productive tasks.
AI: Website chat
Chat products that CRM platforms like Salesforce, Zoho, Fresh Desk, and many other independent companies offer to your website aren't so easy to implement on your site to answer visitor questions and perform tasks.
I say “not that easy” because I've learned from clients who do this that these things take a little time. Setup and configuration is not that difficult. However, if you want to use AI Chat to answer your questions, you need to provide it with the information it needs. You should sit down with your team and create a list of common questions and their answers. One question often leads to another, so you need to know how to manage chat conversations. You need to determine your workflow and flowchart your conversations. You must decide whether to use an agent to send the information automatically or to notify people within your company. These are not technical failures. These are workflow issues that need to be thought through well in advance.
There is a high risk of cutting corners. If your website's chat application rejects your visitors, it can result in lost sales and inconvenience to your customers. If the right data isn't being collected, your customer service or sales representatives may be providing incorrect information or simply wasting their time.
That said, if you're willing to put in the effort, these website chat tools that use AI to handle your requests are very good and are getting better. Deployments are reliable and can deliver significant ROI by freeing up multitaskers to do more and more.
AI: Assistant
Obviously, we are familiar with these: Copilot, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, and many others. Most of my clients have dabbled in these platforms asking for help with emails, documents, and research. No one fully trusts these platforms because they are wrong 10-20 percent of the time. Sorry, it's a “hallucination”. And they're right. This is an issue that needs to be addressed if we really want to think that these platforms are trustworthy. But they are getting better. Also, new services like “Deep Research” in ChatGPT Pro can provide better and more reliable responses if users are willing to wait a little longer for the AI assistant to think about it.
But this is the year business owners and managers need to choose at least one AI assistant, pay for a better version, and rely heavily on it.
“Leaning” here means truly learning first and then using all your abilities. For example, ChatGPT can easily connect to your company's Dropbox, SharePoint, Outlook, Gmail, Slack, and other business systems. This means you can use your company's data to create prompts and get more relevant and useful responses. Additionally, ChatGPT now includes agents that can be launched to perform agent browsing tasks such as filling out forms, requesting supplier or customer updates, and sending email notifications when price changes or new industry regulations are published.
OpenAI also has a vast GPT library of industry-specific apps that far exceeds what ChatGPT offers out of the box. Its image and video production, while far from perfect, is getting much better. Other AI assistants have similar capabilities.
I know very few clients who are aware of these features. Still, by learning your AI assistant (yes, even paying a consultant to train you), you can rely on it and get more value from it. The scope of use can be extended to the entire company. They can preach that no document, proposal, quote, bid, contract, or other communication leaves the company without first getting input from the company's AI assistant. AI assistants can be used wisely to not only research previous activity but also create policies, memos, and contracts for review by lawyers and others.
AI: become reality
All three of these AI applications are officially ready for commercial prime time. I wish I could say the same for many others, but I can't yet. In the meantime, if you are running a business or managing a department or department, we can officially confirm that these applications work and that using them will significantly increase your productivity.
