Your Family Business Can Use AI This Month. Keep Customer Data Out.

In a family business, the person everyone asks is often you. Where is the supplier's invoice, what do we charge for a Saturday job, how did last month go? The answers live in your head, a few spreadsheets and a long trail of emails. A chat assistant such as ChatGPT or Claude can take some of that off you this month, without a developer and without your customers' data. Start with three jobs where a person still checks everything, and keep a short list of what never goes in.

Start with the questions everyone brings you

For one week, write down every question your family and staff ask you more than once, with the answer you gave. Put the answers in one document, take out names and phone numbers, then upload it to the assistant or paste it in, and ask it questions the way a new employee would. When it gets one wrong, check the document first; a missing line is an easy fix.

That document is the start of any assistant, bought or built. Built properly, the assistant answers your team on their phones, only from your own documents, and shows where each answer came from. Our ask-your-business demo shows one, at an invented clinic.

Let it do the first pass on the monthly numbers

The month-end questions rarely change: what came in, what went out, which invoices are overdue, what moved since last month. Export the month from your invoicing tool or till as a spreadsheet, delete every column that names or identifies a customer (name, tax ID, address, email, phone) and keep the invoice number to find the row. Upload the sheet and ask the assistant to compare it with last month. Save the questions as a prompt and ask them in the same words every month, so the answers stay comparable. Then check one total by hand against the invoicing tool before you trust the rest, because chat assistants can get arithmetic wrong.

Let it draft quotes and replies, and send them yourself

A customer writes to ask for a price. Paste the message with the name and contact details taken out, add your price list, and ask for a reply in your usual tone. You edit it and send it yourself. Quotes work the same way: give it the job, your prices and an old quote you liked, with the customer's name taken out, and it drafts the next one in that shape. The AI Playbook has ten email draft templates to start from.

What never goes into a chatbot

Whatever you paste is sent to the company that runs the chatbot, and what happens to it next depends on your plan and its settings. Three things stay out, whatever the settings say:

• Personal data about customers and staff: names with phone numbers or addresses, health details, pay, anything that identifies a person. Write Customer A or Employee 2 instead.
• ID documents: photos or scans of ID cards, passports and driving licences.
• Passwords, PINs, access codes and bank logins, including the ones visible in a screenshot.

Your customers gave that information to you. When a job needs it, the job belongs in a system you own, under a written agreement about where the data lives; that is the kind of system we build.

Read everything before it goes out

Nothing the assistant writes goes to a customer, the tax office or the bank until a person has read it. Decide who that person is for each job, and make it a habit from the first draft. At this stage the check is your last safety net, and it is enough to start.

For the prompts, start with The AI Playbook, our library of cheat-sheets for everyday AI work, free with one email.