ServicesAI chatbot development
AI chatbots for business that answer from your own data
A business chatbot is only as useful as what it knows and what it is allowed to do. We build AI chatbots and assistants for customer service, sales support and internal help desks that answer from your documents and systems, carry out approved actions such as checking an order, and pass a conversation to a person when it should.
How a conversation is handled
- 1
The question is matched to sources and tools the user may access.
- 2
The answer cites the document or record it comes from.
- 3
Actions such as a return wait for confirmation or follow fixed limits.
- 4
Anything uncertain goes to a person, with the conversation attached.
AI chatbots we build
We build on large language models that retrieve from your sources, not on decision trees. Where a fixed menu serves users better, for example to choose a language or a department, we keep it.
- Customer service chatbots that answer questions about orders, products and policies, and hand over to your support team
- Internal help desk assistants for IT, HR or operations questions, answering from your own documentation
- Sales and pre-sales assistants that find product details, availability and terms
- Assistants inside your product, so your customers get help where they work
- Voice assistants for phone lines, where the speed of each response matters
When an off-the-shelf chatbot is enough
Many help desk and CRM products now include an AI chatbot. If your answers live in one knowledge base and the chatbot only has to answer, such a product is often the faster choice, and we will tell you so in the first call.
A custom chatbot is worth building when answers depend on several systems, when the chatbot has to act and not only answer, when data must stay in your environment, or when you need to test and control its behaviour in detail.
Answers you can check
The main risk of a business chatbot is a confident wrong answer. We reduce it in three ways: every answer cites its source, the chatbot declines when its sources don't cover a question, and a test set of real questions, including ones it should refuse, runs before every change. No chatbot is right every time; the test set shows how often yours is right on your questions.
Permissions apply to every answer. A customer sees only their own orders, and an employee gets answers only from documents their role may open.
Handover to your team
A chatbot that can't hand over frustrates customers. We agree with your support team which topics, customers and situations go to a person, and the chatbot passes the conversation with its context so nobody has to ask again. Your team also sees which questions the chatbot could not answer, which shows where the documentation needs work.
A hypothetical customer service chatbot
An online retailer's support team answers the same questions about delivery times, returns and order status every day. The chatbot answers policy questions from the returns and shipping pages, looks up order status in the shop system for logged-in customers, and starts a return only after the customer confirms it. Complaints, damaged goods and any refund above an agreed amount go straight to a person.
The team tracks the share of conversations resolved without handover, the reasons for handovers and customer ratings, next to the cost per conversation.
From pilot to a live chatbot
Every chatbot we launch comes with what your team needs to keep it right after we leave:
- A test set built from past tickets or chat logs, with expected answers and sources
- A limited launch on one channel or customer group first
- Monitoring of answer quality, handovers and cost per conversation
- A runbook for adding sources, changing what the chatbot may do and investigating a wrong answer
Questions
How long does it take to build an AI chatbot?
It depends on how many sources and systems it needs and how strict the review is. You get an estimate after the first call, once we know the use case and the systems involved.
Which language models do you use for chatbots?
The one that does best on your questions at an acceptable cost, from commercial providers your data owners approve or as open-weight models on your own infrastructure. No vendor pays us for choosing theirs.
Can the chatbot work in our website, app or support tool?
Yes. We connect it to the channels you already use, such as your website, app, help desk or internal chat, and to the systems it needs to read from or act in.
Can an AI chatbot meet GDPR requirements?
We build it so your data protection officer can assess it: which data it sees, where it runs, how long conversations are stored and who can read them. Whether it meets GDPR is your advisers' decision, and we prepare what they need for it.
How does a chatbot project start?
With a free 30-minute call about the questions your customers or staff ask most. We need no access to your systems or data for it.
Related services
AI automation
Business processes automated step by step with rules, models and agents, tested on past cases and reported as cost per case.
AI consulting
AI strategy, use case assessment and readiness checks from engineers who also build and measure the first system.
AI engineers for your team
Experienced AI engineers who join your team part-time or for longer and build AI features, agents and platforms with you.
Enterprise AI
Assistants, agents and private AI built into your systems, with your permissions, audit logs and a platform team that can run them.
MCP server development
MCP servers that connect approved internal APIs to AI assistants, with narrow permissions, approval for changes and tests.
RAG development
Assistants that answer from your internal documents, with permissions, citations and tests on your own questions.
AI engineering and architecture
Assistants, voice interfaces and agents in the products you sell, with the serving and retrieval underneath.
Custom model training
A small open-weight model trained for one task and compared with your current model on cost and accuracy.
From the blog
RAG citation quality
How to test whether the passages an assistant cites actually support each claim it makes, with a claim-level check, a worked example and acceptance criteria.
Designing agent escalations
When a process agent should hand a case to a person, what the handoff must contain and how to run the queue that receives it.
RAG document permissions
How access rules travel from source systems into a retrieval index, where they get lost, and which negative tests show that a user cannot retrieve what they may not open.
Talk to an engineer
Bring a few questions your customers or staff ask every day. The call takes 30 minutes and needs no access to your systems or your data.
Booking runs on Google Calendar.
Prefer to write first? Leave your email and a few lines, and we reply with times.
Look for the draft in your email program
Send it from there, and an engineer replies in person with times for a 30-minute call. If no draft has opened, write to us at miki@cloudsail.com.