The opening eBook of the AI, Automation and Tools category. It explains, in plain language, what AI can and can't do for a small business with one to twenty people, and gives you a working set of habits you can adopt this week without spending much money or learning to code.
Members ebook·7 chapters· 40 minute read
Chapter 2
Picking Your First AI Assistant and Getting Set Up Safely
How to choose between the main AI assistants, what to pay, what to put in and what to keep out.
The market for AI assistants looks bigger than it is. There are dozens of products competing for attention, but for a small business owner there are really three or four serious choices and they all do roughly the same thing. Picking between them is less important than picking one and starting.
The decision that matters more is how you set yourself up to use it safely. AI assistants are useful precisely because you can paste real information into them - draft emails, customer messages, meeting notes, half-written proposals. That same usefulness is also where the risk lives. If you paste the wrong thing in, or if you forget what kind of account you signed up for, you can end up sharing customer information you didn't mean to share.
This chapter walks you through picking the right assistant for a small business, choosing the right kind of account and setting a few simple rules about what you'll put in and what you'll keep out.
The full chapter compares the main assistants on price, strengths and small-business fit, and gives you a one-page set-up checklist with the privacy settings and account choices that matter.
The shortlist for a small business
Three names cover most of what a small business owner needs. ChatGPT from OpenAI, Claude from Anthropic and Gemini from Google. There are others worth knowing about, but these three are the workhorses. They all have a free version that's enough to try. They all have a paid version at around £15-£25 a month that's enough for serious daily use.
ChatGPT is the most well-known. It's a strong all-rounder, good at writing and now connected to live search. Claude has a reputation for slightly better writing in long-form and a more thoughtful tone. Gemini is built into Google's tools, which makes it convenient if you already live in Gmail and Google Docs. For most small business owners, any of the three is fine. The one you'll actually open every day is the one that matters.
Free or paid - which to start on
Start free. Use it for a week. If you find yourself opening it most days and getting real value, upgrade to the paid version. The paid versions are noticeably better - longer memory, better quality answers, access to features the free version doesn't have. About £20 a month is a reasonable price for something that saves you several hours a week. If you're not sure yet, the free version is enough to find out.
Don't pay for two assistants at the same time when you're starting. Pick one. Get comfortable. You can always switch later. Owners who try to compare three assistants at once usually end up using none of them properly.
Personal account or business account
All three of the main assistants offer a business or team version on top of the personal one. The business version usually costs a bit more per person and adds two things that matter: a stronger promise that your conversations won't be used to train the model, and the ability to share work with colleagues if you have any. For a single owner, the personal paid plan is fine to start with. For a small team where two or three people will use it, the business version is worth the upgrade.
If you're handling sensitive customer information - health, legal, financial - the business version is the right call from day one. The privacy settings on the personal plans are reasonable, but the business contracts are clearer about what happens to your data.
Set-up checklist for your first AI assistant
Pick one assistant. Don't try to use three at once
Start free for a week. Upgrade if you're using it most days
Set up the account in your name, with a strong password and two-step sign-in
Turn off training on your conversations in the privacy settings if available
Decide one place where the assistant will sit (a browser tab, a phone app) and use it from there
What to put in and what to keep out
The most important rule is also the simplest one. Don't paste anything into an AI assistant that you wouldn't be happy seeing on the front of a local newspaper. That sounds dramatic but it's a useful test. It rules out customer card numbers, full home addresses where the customer hasn't given you permission, health records, anything covered by a confidentiality agreement and your competitor research that contains private documents.
What you can put in: the rough shape of an email, a public-facing description of a customer's situation with no identifying details, a meeting summary you wrote yourself with names removed, a draft proposal with the price replaced by a placeholder. Treat the assistant as a smart, helpful intern who works for the whole world. They can help you think, but you wouldn't hand them the keys to the safe.
Setting up a basic system prompt
Most assistants let you set a default instruction that the assistant follows in every conversation. This is sometimes called a system prompt or custom instructions. It's worth spending fifteen minutes on this once, because everything you do afterwards is faster as a result.
A good default instruction tells the assistant three things. What your business does, in two or three sentences. The audience you serve, in one sentence. The tone you write in, in one sentence. For example: 'I run a plumbing firm in Leeds with three vans, serving homeowners and letting agents. Write replies in a warm, plain-English tone, no jargon, no exclamation marks. British spelling.' Now every time you ask for a draft, the assistant starts from the right place.
What to do this week
Pick one of ChatGPT, Claude or Gemini. Sign up for the free version. Spend twenty minutes setting up the account properly and writing a short default instruction in your own voice. Then save one bookmark in your browser for it and one icon on your phone. By the end of the week the assistant should be one click away from wherever you usually work.
Recurring principle for this chapter: use AI and tools to support judgment, not replace it. For the bigger view of what software you actually need, look ahead to The Small Business Marketing Toolkit. For more on the trust side of how customers see your business, look back at the Brand and Messaging category.
The rest of this chapter walks through the practical steps, the templates and the checklists you need to put it into action. It includes worked examples, copy frameworks and the small decisions that make the difference between a plan that sits in a drive and one that gets used.
Inside you'll find a step-by-step playbook, a downloadable template, a checklist you can run this week and a short list of common mistakes to avoid before you start.
The full action plan, broken into weekly steps.
Ready-to-use scripts, templates and checklists.
Worked examples for different sized businesses.
Common mistakes and how to avoid them.
Members-only chapter
Become a member to read the full chapter
Members get the complete chapter, the step-by-step plan, the templates and the checklists. Cancel anytime.
