The quickest answer to how to use AI for business is to start inside, with your own staff, before you put AI in front of a single customer. On the levelpartner.ai platform that means Ask AI, the in-app assistant that reads your live CRM and answers questions about it, summarises a contact before a call and creates the follow-up task from the same chat. Once your team trusts it, the second step is a Conversation AI bot for customer messages. This article covers both, in that order, with the platform steps for each and the rules that keep the second step safe.
Why staff come before customers
Most companies start with a chatbot on the website, because that is the AI they have seen. It is also the hardest place to begin. A customer-facing bot needs approved answers, hand-off rules and a team that knows what to do when it gets something wrong. If the first AI your staff meet is one that embarrasses them in front of a client, they will resist the next one.
Starting with an assistant for staff reverses that. The account manager who used to spend ten minutes scrolling a contact's history before a call now asks for a summary and reads it in thirty seconds. Nobody outside the company sees a mistake, and the team learns what the AI is good at, and where it needs checking, on work they already know well.
There is a second benefit. Asking questions of your own records exposes how clean they are. If a summary says a client has no open opportunity when everyone knows they do, the AI has not failed. Your data has, and you would rather find that out before a customer-facing bot starts quoting from it.
What Ask AI does for a team
Ask AI sits in the navigation and works as a chat. It needs no set-up. You type a request in plain English and it answers from the real-time data on the platform: conversations, notes and activity, payments and outstanding balances, appointments, tasks and pipelines.
The three uses that save the most time in a company of 30 to 200 people are these.
- Call preparation. A summary of a contact's profile, lead source, open opportunities, appointments, tasks and recent activity before the phone rings.
- Follow-up capture. After the summary, ask it to create a task, update a contact detail or prepare the next outreach, so nothing agreed on the call lives only in someone's head.
- Quick questions. "What tasks are pending for this client?" answered without opening three screens.
Say each account manager runs about 15 renewal calls a week, and preparing for one means reading the contact record, the pipeline and the last few email threads, roughly 12 minutes a call. If an Ask AI summary first, plus a skim of anything it flags, brought preparation down to around 4 minutes, the saving would be 8 minutes a call, or 2 hours per manager each week. Across 8 account managers that is about 16 hours a week back for client work.
Before you start
- Users who will try Ask AI first: pick two or three people who prepare for calls every day.
- Contact records with the basics filled in: owner, lead source, open opportunities and recent notes.
- For the customer bot later: a written list of approved answers, the topics it must hand to a person, and the channels you want it on.
- A named owner for the customer bot who will review conversations every week.
How to get a contact summary from Ask AI
These are the platform steps for the first and most common staff use.
- Open Ask AI from the left-side navigation menu or the top navigation bar.
- In the Ask AI chat box, submit the prompt "Summarize a contact."
- When Ask AI asks which contact to summarise, enter the contact's name, email address or phone number.
- If more than one contact matches, choose the correct one from the list and click Submit.
- Review the summary, which can cover profile and contact details, lead source, opportunities, appointments, tasks and recent activity.
- Carry on the conversation in Ask AI to request a follow-up, such as creating a task, updating contact details or preparing next-step outreach.
Make step six the habit. A summary that ends the conversation saves preparation time. A summary that ends with "create a task to send the revised proposal on Thursday" also closes the gap between what was agreed and what gets done.
How to use AI in business with customers: the second step
After a month of staff use, your team knows how the platform's AI handles your data. That is the point to add a Conversation AI bot for inbound messages on SMS, email, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and web chat. The guided set-up is the simplest of the three ways to build one.
- Go to AI Agents, then Conversation AI, then + Create Bot, and select Guided Form Setup.
- Click Create New Bot.
- Choose a bot type: General Q&A or Appointment Booking.
- Select or create a Brand Voice.
- Configure Bot Settings and Bot Goals.
- Save the bot.
- Set the bot to Off, Suggestive or Auto-Pilot.
- Optionally, click Go to Advanced Settings to keep configuring.
Start in Suggestive mode. The bot drafts each reply and a person on your team reviews and sends it. Only move to Auto-Pilot once the drafts you are sending unchanged far outnumber the ones you edit, and you have tested common questions, unusual questions and booking. For how customer-facing agents are structured across channels, see AI agents for chat and SMS.
How to use AI for small business teams with no spare time
Smaller firms in the 10 to 30 person range often say they have no one to run an AI project. Ask AI is the answer to that objection, because there is no project. It costs no set-up time, and the person who prepares for the most calls benefits on day one.
The customer bot does need an owner, but not a large one. Give the owner one protected hour a week to read a sample of conversations and fix answers. If even that hour is impossible, stay with the staff assistant for now. A neglected customer bot does more harm than no bot.
How to use AI in your business without losing control
Three controls apply to the customer step. Approved content: the bot answers only from material someone has signed off. Hand-off rules: complaints, pricing exceptions, legal questions and anything about a specific contract always go to a person. A record: every exchange sits on the contact in Conversations, where anyone can read it.
Ask AI needs a lighter version of the same discipline. Treat a summary as a briefing, not as evidence. If it is about to shape a decision on price or terms, open the record and check the figure.
Rolling out a customer chatbot first and the staff assistant never. The team only meets AI when it causes extra work, such as correcting a bot's answer, and decides it is a nuisance. Let them use it for their own preparation first and the customer step gets their support instead of their scepticism.
What most guides on using AI for business get wrong
They present AI as a list of tools to buy: a writer, a transcriber, a bot, a meeting assistant. Each arrives with a login and a separate copy of your data. The ones that stick are the ones that sit where the work already happens.
That is why the order matters. An assistant that reads the same contacts, pipelines and tasks your team uses every day is adopted because it shortens a task they already do. A bot that writes to the same records means nobody has to copy anything across. For the AI content tools that draft emails from the same data, see the AI email writer.
The trade-off
Starting internally is slower to show outside. For the first month, customers notice nothing, and a competitor with a new chatbot on its homepage looks further ahead. You give up that early visible signal.
You get a team that understands the AI before customers depend on it, data that has been checked by people asking real questions of it, and a customer bot launched by people who want it to work. For a company trying to grow without adding headcount, the internal hours are also the more certain return.
What to add after the first two
Once the staff assistant and one customer bot are steady, the next candidates sit next to them. If the bot handles first replies, AI follow up for leads who go quiet is a natural third step. If calls are the bottleneck, an AI phone receptionist for missed calls is the fourth. Add one at a time, each with an owner and one number to watch.
Troubleshooting
Ask AI returns the wrong contact
Two records share a name. Search by email address or phone number instead, or merge the duplicates so there is one record per person.
The summary is thin or out of date
The record is thin. If calls, notes and tasks are logged elsewhere, the assistant cannot see them. Get staff logging activity on the contact and the summaries improve within a few weeks.
The customer bot never replies
New bots can start in Off. Check the status, then check that the bot is assigned to the channels you expect.
The bot answers questions it should hand over
The hand-off rules are vague. Name the topics explicitly in the bot's goals and test each one before returning to Auto-Pilot.
Frequently asked questions
Do we need to set anything up before using Ask AI?
No. It works from the data already on the platform. The quality of what it returns depends on how complete your contact records are, so a short tidy of owners, lead sources and notes helps.
Can Ask AI change records?
It can carry out supported follow-ups from the chat, such as creating a task or updating contact details. Review what it proposes before you confirm, as you would with a colleague's suggestion.
How long before the customer bot goes on Auto-Pilot?
Plan for two to four weeks in Suggestive mode. Move when your team is sending most drafts unchanged and you have tested booking, unknown questions and hand-offs.
Is AI usage charged separately?
AI agents are part of the single licence. Usage such as messages, calls and AI replies is billed as used, so a staff assistant used daily and a busy customer bot will show up in usage.