What an AI agent cannot do for a small business

We sell one of these, so treat this accordingly. But the honest limits are more useful than another list of capabilities, and a business that buys software on the strength of what it cannot do tends to be happier with it afterwards.

It cannot exercise judgement it was never given

An agent is good at work that is repetitive, arrives constantly, and follows a pattern. Answering the same eight questions in the owner's words is that kind of work. Deciding whether to give a difficult customer a discount is not. The second requires knowing things that were never written down — what this customer is worth, what happened last time, what the owner can afford this month.

The failure here is quiet, which is what makes it worth naming. An agent asked to make a judgement it has no basis for will produce something plausible rather than refusing. Plausible and wrong is harder to catch than obviously broken.

It cannot hold a relationship

It can answer quickly, accurately and in a consistent voice, which is most of what a first reply needs to do. It cannot notice that this is the third time somebody has been let down, or that a long-standing customer sounds unusually short, and adjust the whole approach because of it. That noticing is the work, and it is the owner's.

• Anything requiring a judgement about money, risk or an exception should reach a person
• Anything a regulator or a professional body governs — clinical, legal, financial advice — should be refused rather than attempted
• Anything where being wrong is expensive and being slow is merely annoying belongs with a human
• Anything repetitive, patterned and constant is where an agent earns its cost

It cannot be accountable

If a reply goes out in a business's name, the business said it. There is no arrangement in which software carries that. This is the practical argument for a narrow agent over a broad one: the narrower the range of things it will attempt, the smaller the set of sentences going out that nobody reviewed.

“The right question is not how much can it handle. It is how confidently you could stand behind everything it might say.”

What is left, and why it is still worth it

After all of that, what remains is narrower than the marketing suggests and more valuable than the scepticism suggests. Most enquiries a small business receives are not judgement calls. They are the same handful of questions, arriving at inconvenient hours, from people who will ask somebody else if they wait too long.

Answering those in seconds, accurately, in the business's own voice, while escalating anything that does not fit the pattern, is a genuinely useful thing to automate. It is also the whole of it. An agent sold as more than that is being sold by somebody who has not thought about what happens when it is wrong.