What an AI business assistant should do
A general chatbot answers from what it learned on the internet. A business assistant has to answer from your own records: sales, stock, payroll, fees, bookings. Its value is saving the hours spent pulling reports, and noticing problems nobody had time to look for.
Test 1: can every answer be traced?
Ask a question you already know the answer to, then ask where the answer came from. A trustworthy assistant shows the period, the records it read and how it counted. If it cannot, you cannot tell a correct answer from a confident mistake.
Test 2: does it respect permissions?
A store manager should not see payroll because they asked the assistant. Log in as users with different roles and ask the same question. The assistant should answer within each person's access and say so when something is outside it.
Test 3: does it tell you first?
The most useful findings are the ones nobody asked for: a supplier raising prices in small steps, a regular customer who has gone quiet, a branch with no sales, stock that has not moved in months. Ask what the assistant raises on its own each week, and how it says how sure it is.
Test 4: who makes the change?
Some assistants can create records or send messages. For anything that changes data, the assistant should draft and a person should review and save. Ask exactly what it can do on its own.
Questions to put to every vendor
Use the same questions with each vendor so the answers are comparable.
- Answer a question we already know, and show the records behind it.
- Log in as two different roles and ask the same question.
- What does it report each week without being asked?
- Which actions can it take without a person approving them?
- Which of our systems can it read, and which can it not?
- Where is our data processed and stored?
