What is an AI assistant?

You may have tried an AI chat tool, where you type a question and get an answer. An AI assistant, sometimes called an AI agent, uses the same technology but does more than chat.

Chat tool or assistant

A chat tool waits for you to ask. It answers, and that is the end of it. It knows nothing about your business and cannot do anything outside the chat window.

An AI assistant is set up for a particular job in your business. It:

• reads what comes in, such as emails or invoices
• prepares the work, such as a draft reply or a bookkeeping entry
• acts on simple tasks by itself, but only within limits you set
• asks a person when it is not sure

It is like an employee with a very clear job description. It only gets access to what it needs for the job, and everything it does is logged so you can check it afterwards.

Example: a guesthouse inbox

This is a made-up example to show how it works, not a real customer.

Picture a small guesthouse that gets lots of emails every day, in Icelandic and English. A morning could look like this:

1. By seven o'clock the assistant has read everything that arrived overnight.
2. It sorts the emails into bookings, cancellations, questions and everything else.
3. For common questions, like when rooms are ready, it drafts a reply using the information the guesthouse has given it.
4. Complaints and unusual requests go straight to the owner with a short summary.
5. The owner sits down with a coffee, reads the drafts, fixes what needs fixing and sends them.

Nothing goes to a guest until a person has approved it. The assistant saves the time spent reading, sorting and starting replies. The judgement stays with the owner.

Another example: a fish exporter's invoices

Also made up.

A fish exporter gets invoices from hauliers, harbours and packaging suppliers, some in Icelandic and some in English. The assistant reads each invoice, picks out the supplier, date, amount and VAT, and prepares an entry for the books. The bookkeeper then checks the entries and approves them. If something does not add up, for example if the same invoice seems to have arrived twice, the assistant flags it and waits for the bookkeeper.

Where the limits are

An AI assistant is not magic. Like all AI, it makes mistakes. It understands Icelandic but sometimes gets it wrong. That is why we always start with one task and test it for two to four weeks on your own data. You see in black and white how it performs before you decide whether to carry on.

If you want to know whether an AI assistant would suit your business, get in touch.