An AI assistant on your site: the decisions to make

A conversational assistant can answer your visitors at any hour, guide your customers or help your teams find information. But its quality depends less on the technology than on the choices made before it goes live. Here are the six decisions to make.

1. What is it for?

An assistant that "answers everything" answers poorly. Define a precise role: informing about your services, tracking an order, guiding the use of a product, qualifying a sales enquiry. A clear scope makes the assistant more useful and easier to evaluate.

2. What content does it rely on?

Ideally, it answers from your own documents: website pages, guides, frequently asked questions, terms. Check that this content is up to date, consistent and written to be understood out of context. What the assistant cannot find in your sources, it should be able to admit.

3. What does it do when it does not know?

Plan for the case where the assistant has no answer or is dealing with a sensitive topic. The right reflex is to say so simply and offer a way forward: a form, an email address, an adviser. A well-designed handover beats an approximate answer.

4. In which languages?

If your visitors write in French and in English, test the assistant in both languages, with the way people really write. Also check that the tone stays true to your brand.

5. What happens to the privacy of conversations?

Decide what information the assistant may receive, what is kept and for how long. Tell users clearly that they are talking to an automated assistant, and avoid asking for data you do not need.

6. How do you measure its quality?

Regularly review real conversations, spot the questions without a good answer and fix the content. An assistant is run like a service: it improves through iterations, not in a single launch.

In practice

At Xearth, we design these assistants with you, from scoping to supervision. Discover our AI assistants and agents or contact us to discuss it.