Questions Businesses Ask Before Building an AI Agent

You pay for the build once and then a monthly cost that moves with how many calls and chats the agent handles. Practices and agencies usually start with one focused agent, a receptionist for a single location or a chat agent on one product, because it is the cheapest thing to get live and the easiest to judge. A multi-channel build wired into a CRM costs more and takes longer. We quote a fixed number after a discovery call rather than a range, and the cost guide walks through what sits behind it.

A part-time receptionist costs more per month than most of our agents do, and covers about forty hours of the week rather than all of them. That comparison misses the real number though. What owners usually work out on the first call is roughly how many enquiries went to voicemail last month, and what one of those was worth.

Two to four weeks for a first agent, which breaks down into a week where we work out what it should and should not do, a week or two connecting it to your calendar or CRM and writing what it says, and a final week testing it against conversations that actually happened rather than ones we invented. Bigger builds get phased so the first piece is answering calls while the rest is still being written.

Phone systems and calendars, the CRMs most of our clients already run on such as HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive and GoHighLevel, help desks like Zendesk and Intercom, stores on Shopify or WooCommerce, and accounting tools like QuickBooks. Anything else with an API we reach through n8n or connect directly, and where a system has no API we will tell you rather than building something fragile around it.

The agent runs with credentials scoped to exactly what it needs, everything moves and sits encrypted, and every action it takes is logged where you can read it back. For clients who would rather their data never left their own environment, we self-host the workflow layer, and we build to HIPAA, GDPR and CCPA requirements wherever they apply to what you do.

It hands the call to a person. You set the rules for when that happens, whether it transfers straight away, opens a ticket, or alerts whoever is on duty, and the person who picks it up gets the transcript and the account already open in front of them. Nobody has to explain the whole thing twice.

Yes. The workflows, the prompts and the integrations we build are yours to keep, and clients who later want to run it in house get handed the lot rather than a login. Most ask us to keep hosting and tuning it, because the monthly review of the calls it fumbled is the part that keeps it working.