AI staff for small businesses · UK

Get your week back.

An AI assistant that answers your customers around the clock, clears the admin nobody gets round to, and watches the things that only become urgent because no one looked. One defined job, built around how your business actually works, proved before it goes near a customer.

Friday
Online since 2:14am Answered 43 today Never off sick
Quotes your real prices Says when she doesn't know Stops for you on anything that counts

Start here

Where does the week actually go?

Not the work you're good at. The work that sits between it — and the reason so many small businesses end up doing their real job in the evening.

None of it needs judgement. All of it needs doing. That is exactly the shape of work worth handing over — and exactly the shape nobody gets round to delegating, because explaining it to someone costs more time than doing it yourself.

What you're actually buying

Four kinds of work, taken off you.

Not a chatbot subscription. Most businesses start with one of these, prove it pays for itself, then add the next. Every one is a real job with a clear finish — never "handles your operations".

Included
Friday behind a reception counter, talking to a visitor

An assistant that knows your business

  • Your prices, your hours, your coverage, your way of saying things
  • Answers from what you taught it — and says so when it doesn't know
  • Takes names and numbers, and passes on what needs you
  • Lives on your existing website. One line of code, nothing installed
Included
Friday at a desk working through paperwork

A control panel you actually use

  • Change what it knows yourself, in plain English, in seconds
  • Every enquiry it captured, exportable to a spreadsheet
  • Every question it was asked — and everything it couldn't answer
  • A box to test it before your customers do
Included
Friday at a desk at night watching four monitors

The whole conversation, emailed to you

  • When someone finishes, you get what they asked and what was said
  • Anything it couldn't answer, pulled out as a to-do list
  • Straight to your inbox, or Slack, or both
Included
Friday at a whiteboard drawing lines between connected systems

Limits that make it safe to leave running

  • A daily spending ceiling — a number you pick, in the agreement
  • Caps per visitor and per connection, so bots can't run up a bill
  • An off switch that stops it dead, with nothing else affected
  • A named person who signs the build off and stays reachable
Friday working at a desk late at night, a city lit up behind her
03:12

Nobody is in the office. The enquiry that came in four minutes ago has already been answered, logged, and put in front of you for the morning.

The arithmetic

What are those hours actually costing you?

Most people have never put a number on it, which is exactly why it never gets fixed. Move the sliders — that figure is what this work costs you every year, before anybody quotes you anything.

If you'd pay someone else to do it, use their cost. If you do it yourself in the evening, use what you'd have earned doing the real job instead.

That work is costing you £16,560 a year

Roughly 9.8 working weeks a year.

See what it would cost to fix

And if you hired somebody to do it instead

SalaryEmployer NIPensionDesk & kitTrue cost
£25,000£3,000£563£3,000£31,563
£28,000£3,450£653£3,000£35,103
£32,000£4,050£773£3,000£39,823

2026/27 rates: employer National Insurance at 15% above the £5,000 threshold, 3% minimum pension on qualifying earnings, and £3,000 assumed for a desk, equipment and management time. A first-time employer may be able to claim Employment Allowance against the NI.

That person works about 1,700 of the 8,760 hours in a year. They take holiday, they get ill, and eventually they leave and you do it all again. Friday isn't a replacement for them — it takes the repetitive and out-of-hours half of the job so the people you already have can spend their time on the half that needs a human.

How it's priced: a fixed price to build the job, agreed before anything starts, and a flat monthly fee to run it. Never per conversation — a meter puts your bill up on your busiest day and invites an argument about what counts as resolved.

The range

What can it be taught?

More than most people expect, and less than the industry claims. This is the working list — what can be discussed as possible, not a list of things already running.

Answering & enquiries

Questions, quotes from approved figures, gathering requirements, out-of-hours cover, spotting urgency, routing, escalating to a person.

Email & inbox

Triage, thread summaries, finding what's gone unanswered, drafted replies, prepared follow-ups, pulling out the actions, inbox digests.

Documents

Read, search, summarise and compare. Extract fields into a spreadsheet. Explain difficult wording. Spot discrepancies between two versions.

Writing

Quotations, proposals, reports, letters, policies, procedures, product descriptions and campaign copy — in your tone, from your material.

Sales & follow-up

Qualify an enquiry, research a prospect, prepare the follow-up, summarise the opportunity, flag what's gone stale, update the CRM.

Admin & data

Data extraction, form processing, recurring reports, record updates, moving information between systems, working through a checklist.

Monitoring

Scheduled checks, morning and weekly summaries, deadline and renewal watching, threshold alerts, escalating the exceptions.

Reporting

Analyse a spreadsheet, generate the report, spot the trend, compare periods, flag the anomaly, explain the result in plain English.

Company knowledge

Conversational access to your policies, procedures, product knowledge and past correspondence — so it isn't all in one person's head.

Staff support

Onboard a new starter, explain a process, answer the internal questions, produce the training material nobody has time to write.

Calendar

Availability, suggested times, schedule summaries, reminders, meeting preparation, creating and updating events where connected.

Joined-up workflows

Multi-step processes with approval gates, triggered by a form, a schedule, or something happening in another system.

What actually gets built depends on your systems and your permissions. We check yours before anyone quotes a price — and if something can't be done, you'll be told that rather than sold it.

Works with what you already pay for

What can it plug into?

It doesn't replace your systems — it works inside them. If it has a way in for software, it can usually be taught to use it.

Microsoft 365, Outlook, Teams, Pipedrive, GoCardless, Sage Payroll, monday.com and most industry-specific software sit alongside these. They are systems with a usable way in — not a claim that each is already wired into your business. What gets connected depends on your plan with them and the permissions you can grant, which is why we check before quoting. If something you rely on isn't shown, ask: the answer is either “yes, it has an API” or “no, and here's the workaround”.

Under the bonnet

Where it runs, and who holds what.

No software on your machines. No box in a cupboard. Nothing installed.

One line on your website

Works on any site, anywhere — WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, something built for you years ago. Your hosting doesn't change. Take the line off and everything carries on as before.

Your knowledge, under your control

Your prices, hours and policies sit in a file you can edit yourself in seconds. It's read fresh with every question — so changing an answer is editing a document, not retraining anything.

UK hosting, sealed per business

Each business is its own locked box: its own knowledge, limits, budget and login. One assistant cannot see anything belonging to another.

A spending ceiling you choose

A daily limit, written into the agreement, that stops it dead. Plus caps per visitor and per connection, so a script pointed at it is blocked before it costs you anything.

Everything written down

What it did, when, and who asked for it. Every conversation and enquiry exports to a spreadsheet whenever you like. If you can't check up on it, you shouldn't give it keys.

An off switch that works

One click and it stops. Your site, your systems and your day carry on exactly as they were — we never become the thing your business runs on.

The bit nobody else puts on their website

Most of these don't work.

A great deal of money is being raised on the idea that you can hire an AI, point it at your company and walk away. It mostly doesn't happen — and you should know why before you spend anything, including with us.

3 in 10

Give the best AI a normal office job to run start to finish on its own, and it finishes about three out of ten.

2 in 10

Of the AI projects businesses paid for last year, only about two in ten ended up being used day to day.

4 in 10

More than four in ten are expected to be scrapped altogether within the next couple of years.

The reason is just arithmetic. Say it gets each step right nine times out of ten — excellent, better than most people. Ask it to do twelve things in a row where each depends on the last, and it gets the whole job right about three times in ten. Nothing broke. It just did twelve things.

So we don't build it that way. Short jobs. A person checking the steps that matter. One job proved before the next is added. That is the entire difference between this working and this being another cancelled project.

Getting one

How you actually get started.

  1. 1

    Tell us the annoying bit

    One question: what do you do every day that you wish you didn't have to? We pick the smallest job worth doing, not the most impressive one.

  2. 2

    We check it's actually possible

    Does everything involved have a way in for software? Who can grant permission? Anything we can't verify gets flagged as needing investigation — never promised.

  3. 3

    You get a fixed quote

    For that one job. With the autonomy level and the daily spend ceiling written into it before a penny changes hands.

  4. 4

    It shadows you for a fortnight

    Drafting everything, sending nothing, so you can compare its work to yours before a customer ever sees it.

  5. 5

    It goes live one notch at a time

    We move the autonomy dial up by one. Not two.

  6. 6

    It earns the next job, or it doesn't

    If the first one doesn't pay for itself there isn't a second. That's the bit most people selling this won't put in writing.

Before you ask

The questions buyers actually ask.

Do I need my website to be with you?

No. It works on any website, anywhere — WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, something built for you years ago. One line of code goes on your page and nothing else on your hosting changes. Take the line off and everything carries on as before.

What happens when it doesn't know something?

It says so and offers to take their details, and you get an email listing exactly what it couldn't answer. That's the learning loop — you add the fact, and it's never stuck on it again. An assistant that goes off and fills the gaps on its own is the one that invents a price and says it with total confidence.

Could it run up a huge bill?

No. There's a daily spending ceiling, you choose the number, and it's in the agreement. It stops dead when it gets there. There are also caps per visitor and per connection, so a script pointed at it gets blocked before it costs you anything.

Is my data used to train an AI?

No. Your information is sent with each question, an answer comes back, and nothing is retained or learned at the other end. Your knowledge file stays on our server and your enquiries stay yours — exportable to a spreadsheet whenever you like.

Can another business see my information?

No. Each business is a sealed box with its own knowledge, its own limits, its own budget and its own login. One assistant cannot read anything belonging to another, and a login only ever reaches its own business.

How long before it's doing something useful?

Weeks rather than months, because the first job is deliberately small. Then a fortnight of it drafting and you checking before anything goes live.

What if we want to stop?

One switch. Your website, your systems and your day carry on exactly as before — we never become the thing your business runs on, deliberately.

Who's actually responsible for it?

CREATE, a UK agency. A named person signs off the build and stays reachable afterwards. "The AI did it" has never been a good answer to give a customer.

The real thing, on this page

Don't take our word for it. Ask her.

This is a live assistant, not a video and not a scripted demo — the same software a customer gets, answering from a real knowledge base. Ask it something awkward. What it does when it doesn't know is the part worth watching.

Yours would not sound like this one. This assistant has been taught CREATE's business — your services, prices, hours, the things you don't do and the way you'd want them said all go into a file that only you control. The software is the same; everything it knows is yours.

Whenever you're ready

Tell us what's eating your week.

No forms and no discovery document. Tell us the annoying bit and you'll get an honest answer about whether Friday can take it — including when she can't.

Nobody signs up for an AI assistant. They sign up for the evening back, the enquiry that didn't go cold, and the invoice that got chased without anyone having to remember.

Start with the one thing that annoys you most. If it doesn't pay for itself in a fortnight, there isn't a second one — and you'll have lost nothing but the conversation.

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