An AI agent is software that can carry out a task on your behalf, choosing its own steps and using tools you connect it to, such as your inbox, calendar or bookkeeping software. Several jobs below need only simpler automation, so you do not have to buy something labelled an "agent" to get the benefit. The useful question is which jobs these tools handle reliably, and where a person still needs to make the call.
Reception and phone answering
An AI receptionist can greet callers, answer simple questions such as opening hours, route calls, screen out sales pitches and spam, and take messages when you are closed. Live calls are harder to get right than written tasks, so start small.
What to give it: your opening hours, who handles what, a short list of questions it may answer, and clear rules on when to put a call through. Include urgent cases, such as a burst pipe or a same-day cancellation.
What to watch out for: callers stuck in a loop with no way to reach a person. Offer a route to a human or a callback within a timeframe you can actually meet, and decide what happens if the service fails or messages go unread. Before going live, test it with unusual names, addresses, accents, background noise and urgent calls.
Telling callers they are speaking to an automated assistant is good practice. If calls are recorded or transcribed, tell callers, point them to your privacy information, and limit who can access recordings and how long you keep them. The ICO has guidance. For unwanted calls, the ICO handles complaints about marketing calls and Ofcom deals with silent and abandoned calls, while suspected scams are a fraud matter: GOV.UK lists the current reporting routes.
First step: one possible starting point is out-of-hours message taking only, with you reading the transcripts each morning.
Customer service
An agent can answer common questions from your own material: FAQs, prices you are happy to share, returns policy, delivery times and product guides. Using approved, current documents can improve accuracy, but the agent can still misread them or invent an answer. Test its responses and make sure it can hand over when unsure.
What to give it: up to date documents, and clear rules on when to hand over to a person, for example:
- complaints or an upset customer
- refunds, compensation or anything involving money
- questions it cannot answer from your documents
- anything that sounds like a legal or safety issue
What to watch out for: promises you never made. If the agent tells a customer they qualify for a refund, that customer may reasonably expect one. An outdated policy will be quoted as if it were today's.
First step: run it on your website chat with your top twenty questions, and check a sample of conversations every week.
Sales enquiries and marketing drafts
An agent can reduce the time taken to acknowledge enquiries. It can reply to web enquiries within minutes, ask a few qualifying questions, book a call into your diary and set follow-up reminders from your CRM.
What to give it: the questions that tell you whether a lead is worth pursuing, such as budget range, location, timescale and type of job. Allow calendar booking, and read-only CRM access where you can.
What to watch out for: quoting prices, agreeing terms or offering discounts. Those stay with a person. Then there are the marketing rules. Replying to an enquiry or sending a booking reminder is not automatically direct marketing, but promotional follow-ups may be. Under PECR, unsolicited marketing emails and texts to individuals, including sole traders and some partnerships, generally need consent or a valid soft opt-in. Different rules apply to companies, though UK GDPR may still cover named contacts. Being in your CRM is not permission to market. Check the ICO's guidance first.
Marketing drafts follow the same pattern. An agent can draft posts, newsletters and product descriptions, but a person should check each one for invented facts, claims you cannot back up and a tone that is not yours. The CAP Code applies whoever wrote the words.
First step: an instant acknowledgement to web enquiries with an offer to book a call. Nothing else yet.
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Admin and accounts
An agent can sort the inbox, pull supplier names, dates, amounts and VAT from receipts into your bookkeeping software, and produce meeting notes with actions. It can also draft overdue-invoice reminders for you to approve before they go.
What to give it: access to the specific mailbox or folder it needs, not your whole account, plus rules on what counts as urgent and your standard reminder wording.
What to watch out for: misread figures and miscategorised expenses. Keep sample checking for as long as you use it, and approve exceptions yourself: VAT treatment, credit notes, possible duplicates and unusually large amounts. Extracting a VAT figure is not the same as deciding whether it is reclaimable. Keep the required records, including acceptable digital copies where permitted, for the relevant HMRC retention period, which GOV.UK sets out.
Never let an agent change supplier bank details. Verify any change through a contact route you already trust, because approving a convincing fake invoice is still a loss. Meeting notes need reading too, and people should know if a meeting is recorded.
First step: receipt extraction, approving every entry at first, then moving to regular samples and exceptions.
Start small and stay in charge
- Choose one job: usually the one that takes the most time with the least judgement.
- Decide how you will measure it: missed calls, response time, hours saved, errors found.
- Give the tool only the data and access that job needs.
- Check its work closely at first, then by regular sampling.
- Review after a month and keep, change or stop.
People approve payments, refunds, discounts, contracts and anything legally binding, and customers are told when they are dealing with an automated assistant.
Control what each tool can do, not just see. Restrict sending, deleting, exporting and changing bookings, use multi-factor authentication where available, keep activity logs and know how to revoke access quickly. Emails, documents and callers can contain hidden instructions meant to manipulate an agent, known as prompt injection. The NCSC publishes small business guidance and advice on AI security.
Under UK GDPR, establish a lawful basis, check the provider's role and contract terms, retention and deletion, subprocessors and any overseas transfers, and consider whether a higher-risk use needs a DPIA. Update your privacy notice if needed, and read the ICO's guidance on AI. Features and terms change often, so confirm details with the provider directly.
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