When AI answers your customers directly
A chatbot on your own website is the most exposed AI you can deploy. Four decisions to make before it goes live, and one that is not optional.
Putting an AI assistant on your website is the most tempting AI project and the most exposed. Every other use in this blog has a person between the model and the customer. This one removes them.
That is not a reason to refuse. It is a reason to make four decisions deliberately.
1. What it is allowed to say about price
Nothing specific, unless the price is genuinely fixed and published. The problem from March applies directly: a figure a customer sees is a figure they may rely on, and a generated one carries your name.
« Our standard hourly rate is published here » is safe. Any sentence that estimates a job is not.
2. What it says when it does not know
This is the decision that separates a useful assistant from an embarrassing one. The default behaviour of most models is to produce a plausible answer rather than admit a gap.
Configure it to say it does not know and offer a person, and then test that by asking it three things that are not in your material. If it invents answers in testing, it will invent them for customers.
3. Whether the customer knows
Say plainly that it is an automated assistant. Not in a footer — in the first message. Customers are markedly more forgiving of a machine that says it is a machine, and markedly less forgiving of discovering it afterwards.
4. What happens to the conversation
People type things into website chats that they would never put in an email: full names, account details, occasionally medical or financial circumstances. You are now processing that. Decide retention, decide who can read the transcripts, and write both into the same page as your other AI rules.
The one that is not optional
A visible, one-click route to a human, available in every exchange and not hidden behind three failed attempts.
Partly because it is good service. Mainly because it is your containment: whatever the assistant gets wrong, a customer who can immediately reach a person has an annoyance rather than a complaint.
Companies that get this wrong do not usually get it wrong on capability. They get it wrong by making the machine the only door.