Article

What it takes to put an AI assistant on your website

Dr. Dmitry Nikelshpur · October 13, 2026 · 6 min read

If you’ve visited the home page of this site, you may have met Theo, our AI consultant. You can type to it or talk to it by voice, and it answers questions about how we work and helps visitors figure out whether we’re a fit. Building it taught us what actually matters when you put an AI assistant in front of your customers.

Give it one job

“Add a chatbot” is not a goal. Decide what a successful conversation looks like for your business. For us it’s simple: a visitor understands what we do, gets a useful first take on their idea, and either books a call or leaves their contact details. Everything in the assistant’s instructions points toward that outcome.

For a dental practice the job might be answering insurance and scheduling questions; for a contractor, collecting the details needed for an estimate. Pick one. An assistant that tries to do everything does none of it well.

Ground it in your content — and teach it to say “I don’t know”

A general-purpose AI knows a lot about the world and nothing about your business. The assistant needs your own material: services, process, policies, common questions. Just as important is what it should not do:

• No firm prices or promises. It can describe how pricing works; a person confirms numbers.
• No guessing. When it doesn’t know, it says so and offers to connect the visitor with a person.
• Stay on topic. Politely steer back when a conversation drifts.

Most embarrassing chatbot stories come from skipping these rules, not from the AI being “bad.”

Make sure every conversation reaches you

This turned out to be the most valuable feature — and the easiest to overlook. When a conversation ends, we receive an automatic summary: who the visitor was (if they said), what they’re trying to do, and the suggested next step. Visitors can also ask for a copy of the summary by email.

Without this, an assistant is a black box that occasionally helps someone. With it, every conversation becomes a lead note, and you learn what people actually ask — which is often not what you expected.

Chat, voice, or both?

Chat is cheaper, easier to test and easier to review. Voice feels remarkably natural and suits people who’d rather talk than type, or who are on a phone. It also raises the bar: microphone permission, a clear way to end the call, a summary offered before goodbye, and careful thought about recording and transcripts. We started with chat and added voice once chat was working well. That order is a good default.

Handle privacy and abuse up front

• Be clear it’s AI. Visitors should never wonder whether they’re talking to a person.
• Update your privacy policy to cover what’s collected, why, and how long it’s kept.
• Ask visitors not to share sensitive information such as passwords, account numbers or health details.
• Limit usage so a bot or a bored visitor can’t run up your bill.

Test it like a skeptical customer

Before launch, try to break it: ask for a discount, ask about a competitor, ask something it can’t know, wander off topic, leave halfway through. After launch, read the conversation summaries every week for the first month. Each odd answer is a sentence to add to its instructions. The assistant gets noticeably better within a few rounds.

What it costs

The AI usage itself is generally modest at small-business traffic levels, because you pay for what visitors actually use. The real investment is upfront: deciding the job, writing and testing the instructions, connecting it to your email and calendar, and handling privacy properly. That’s the part that separates an assistant that quietly brings in leads from one that embarrasses you.

Read next: Using AI in a small business without an IT department