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Notes from the build

What we learn shipping AI into businesses that can't afford for it to go wrong. Roughly monthly, no newsletter sequence attached.

Latest · 6 min read

The three questions to ask before you buy an AI chatbot

Most chatbot projects fail for the same three reasons, and all of them are visible before anyone writes a line of code. Here is what to ask a vendor — including us — before you sign anything.

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Everything else

Costs

What a WhatsApp booking agent actually costs to run

Build price is the number people ask about. Running cost is the one that decides whether it survives its first year. A full breakdown from three live clients.

Strategy

Why we tell clients to automate the boring thing first

The impressive project is almost never the right first project. The dull one that happens 200 times a week is where the money and the trust both come from.

Voice

Voice agents in 2026: what they can and can't do yet

They handle booking, triage and simple questions well. They still struggle with accents in noisy places and anything requiring genuine negotiation. An honest scorecard.

Automation

Your CRM isn't the problem. The gap between it and your inbox is.

Before you migrate to a fifth CRM, look at what happens between a customer sending an email and a record being updated. That's usually where the work is.

Security

How to keep customer data out of AI training sets

The settings that matter, the contract clauses to ask for, and the questions that tell you quickly whether a vendor has thought about this at all.

Practice

The handover document we give every client

What's in it, why we write it during the build rather than at the end, and why we'd rather you were able to leave us.

The AI Readiness Checklist

Twelve questions that tell you whether your business is ready to automate something — and which process to pick first. Three pages, no sales pitch.