What business information should I prepare for a website AI assistant?
Before choosing an assistant’s personality, decide what information it can use. A useful starting pack can be a short document and a list of approved pages. This guide offers an original worksheet for a fictional furniture restoration business, rather than results from our demos.
1. Start with one visitor task
Choose a practical task: “Help a visitor prepare a furniture restoration enquiry.” Collect information that supports that task, such as the types of work considered, the photographs needed and how to request an assessment. Avoid gathering every document the business owns. GOV.UK’s user-needs guidance starts with what a person needs to do. Applied here, that gives your knowledge pack a useful boundary.
2. Write answer cards with visible limits
For each common question, record the approved answer, its source and any exception. For example: Question: “Do you restore dining chairs?” Approved answer: “We consider wooden dining chairs after reviewing photographs.” Limit: “Do not promise that a particular chair is repairable.” Next step: “Ask the visitor to prepare an overall photograph and a close-up of the damage for the business to review.” These are fictional examples to adapt and approve, not statements about a real restoration service.
3. Resolve conflicting information
List the pages and documents you intend to supply. If an old brochure says collections happen on Fridays but the current service page says collections are arranged individually, ask the owner which answer applies. Record that decision and remove the superseded version from the approved pack. Do not leave the assistant to settle a business-policy disagreement. Keep public answers separate from internal notes, and exclude credentials, private correspondence and confidential customer records.
4. Name an owner and a review trigger
Give each topic a person responsible for approving changes, a last-checked date and a reason to review it again. For example: “Collection arrangements; approved by the business owner; review whenever the collection service changes.” The Department for Education’s content strategy guidance recommends clear ownership, factual accuracy, maintenance and a process for archiving old content. A small business can apply those principles in a simple document; a new platform is not required.
5. Separate knowledge from permission
A website publishes information and provides routes to contact you. A retrieval-based chatbot finds relevant material from an approved collection to help answer questions. An agent with actual tool permissions may perform specified actions. Supplying collection information does not give an assistant permission to arrange a collection, access a calendar, take payment or send email. Add a boundary statement to your pack: “Help prepare the request; a person confirms feasibility and arrangements.”
6. Hand over a small, usable pack
Prepare four things: the visitor task, approved answer cards, a source list with owners and review triggers, and the questions that require a person. Then use our existing guide to testing replies to check how those materials work in conversation. Explore Meet the agents with fictional details if you want examples: SousChef is a build for the founder’s own catering business, while SpecBot is a live specialist catalogue demonstration. Neither is independent client endorsement. Include your task and knowledge sources in Create my project brief; it downloads locally and does not send an enquiry.