An AI office assistant needs a dependable account of how your business works. If your website gives one service area, an old brochure gives another and the owner makes exceptions nobody has written down, the assistant starts with the same confusion a new employee would face.
Preparing the information is useful even if you decide not to add an assistant yet. It exposes unclear wording, outdated details and decisions that currently depend on someone remembering a conversation. Keep the material short, specific and owned by someone who can approve changes.
Begin with the work you actually take on
List your current services in plain language, with a brief explanation of what each includes. Add the kinds of work you do not undertake where customers commonly ask about them. Avoid copying a competitor's service list or leaving old services in place to make the business look broader.
Record your service area and any genuine limits. If travel outside the usual area depends on the project, say who decides. Do not turn an occasional exception into a standard offer. Include the customer types you serve where that affects suitability, such as residential work, commercial maintenance or particular project sizes.
Put contact and availability details in one place
Write down the correct phone number, business email, contact-page address and office hours. Distinguish office availability from time spent working on site. Include what happens during closures and who keeps those details current.
Document the actual next step after an inquiry. Does someone call to discuss it? Are photos reviewed first? Does an assessment need to happen before a quotation? The assistant should be able to describe that process without implying that an inquiry has already become a confirmed booking.
Gather questions your team repeatedly answers
Ask the person handling calls which questions come up most often. Start with real questions from day-to-day work rather than an invented list of everything a customer could ask. Write answers that the business is comfortable publishing or giving to an unfamiliar caller.
Keep answers practical. Explain what a customer should have ready, how to describe a project and which details help an initial review. Where an answer depends on the job, preserve that uncertainty. “The team will need to review the site details” is more accurate than a fixed answer invented for convenience.
Keep prices and promises under control
Identify any prices that are genuinely public, current and approved for this use. Note what each covers and where an assessment or separate quotation is still required. Do not feed the assistant an old estimate and expect it to understand that the amount was specific to one customer.
Write down who can confirm prices, scheduling and exceptions. If those decisions stay with the owner, make that an explicit limit. The source material should not contain casual phrases that can be mistaken for universal promises, such as an old message saying a job could always be completed the following week.
Choose intake questions deliberately
Define the smallest set of information needed to review a new inquiry. That might include the customer's name, contact details, town, type of work and a short description. Explain why each item matters so unnecessary questions are easier to spot.
Decide which details are optional and what happens when a customer does not know an answer. Do not ask for passwords, payment details or sensitive documents just to start a conversation. Consider who will see the submitted information, where it will be stored and how long it needs to be kept.
Separate public answers from internal material
Internal notes may include supplier arrangements, private contact numbers, customer details and comments that should never appear in an external conversation. Do not hand over a whole shared drive because sorting it feels time-consuming. Prepare a focused set of approved information instead.
Label anything that is for staff reference only and confirm whether the proposed setup needs it at all. Keep a dated master copy, with a named person responsible for reviewing it. When something changes, update that copy rather than allowing several competing versions to circulate.
Test the information before testing the personality
Have someone unfamiliar with the business read the material and answer a handful of typical customer questions using only what is written. Missing answers and contradictions will become apparent quickly. Resolve them with the owner rather than asking the assistant to guess.
Then test the intended assistant against the same questions, including requests it must hand to a person. Frisk can scope custom AI office assistants around an agreed role; integrations are separate decisions. Clear business information makes that discussion more concrete and keeps the work focused on helping the staff who will use it.