Soon some of the messages and calls reaching your business won’t come from people. They will come from AI assistants, sent by real customers to find someone, ask the questions, and help them book. And an assistant can only pass along the answers it can get. In my latest video I walk through what that looks like at your front door, and what to fix so you don’t get skipped.
Three ways an assistant shows up
The big AI labs are now shipping personal assistants that don’t stop at answering. You give one an errand and it goes and does it, with your approval. Sooner or later, the errand is find me a lawyer, or a plumber, or an accountant. Your customer is still a person. Their assistant can be the first one through your door.
It shows up three ways. As a written inquiry a customer had AI draft for them, something polished like “my father owns his home and wants to talk about a trust.” It is easy to write that off as junk, so don’t, polish proves nothing either way, just ask your usual qualifying questions. As a short list, where the customer asks an assistant who handles this nearby and you never see whether you made the cut. And as the assistant that wants an answer now, in a chat or on a call, asking what your intake person hears every day: do you handle trusts, is the first meeting by video, when is your next opening.
Carmen’s two calls
Here is how it plays out, as an illustration. Carmen asks her assistant to find an estate planning attorney for her dad and book something this week. It contacts two firms. The first goes to voicemail, and the website form promises someone will reach out within two business days, so the assistant has nothing to report and moves on. The second answers right away: yes, they handle trusts, the first meeting can be by video, here is what to bring, there is an opening Thursday at ten.
Carmen approves the slot and the booking is confirmed. Both firms might have equally good lawyers, but the assistant can only pass along what it got, and the voicemail gave it nothing. It is the same lesson as nobody answered, so they called the next office, except now a machine is doing the calling, and it never feels guilty about moving on.
Make your front door work for them
Five fixes, starting with a test. Ask AI to search for firms like yours in your county and see whether you are missing or the facts are wrong. Put your answers on your public website in plain text, not inside an image: what you do and don’t do, the areas you serve, how the first meeting works, how to book, and what you charge, even if the honest answer is a flat figure quoted after the first meeting. A missing answer doesn’t read as call us. It reads as skip.
Answer at the speed of software, after hours included, which is where an AI employee on your line helps, ours books calls on our calendar without waiting on us. Give it a real calendar with open times, and test the whole path from your site to the confirmation. And scale the human check to the stakes: routine logistics can run on their own once your team has tested the rules, but anything that is actual advice waits for a person, with the reply saying so and still offering a time to talk. Gartner expects a quarter of traditional search traffic to move to AI assistants by 2026. Your front door used to be built for people. The good news is that everything an assistant needs, a busy person wanted all along: a fast answer, clear facts, an easy way to book. This is the other side of answering being just the front door. If you want to know how ready your front door is today, that is what a free assessment is for.