What to look for
Small businesses should judge chatbot platforms by accuracy, handoff behavior, setup effort, integrations, and whether the bot can be kept current without creating more work.
- Easy updates to business information
- Clear escalation to a person
- Website and mobile-friendly behavior
- Lead capture and conversation summaries
- Controls for what the bot should not answer
When a platform is enough
A standard chatbot platform can work well for simple FAQs, store hours, basic lead capture, or routing visitors to existing pages.
When to build custom
A custom chatbot makes more sense when answers depend on your services, pricing rules, customer type, documents, or follow-up process. That is where AI-City can tie the chat experience into the rest of the business.