AI assistants for small business
Useful AI, set up around the work you already do.
Assistants that answer from your own policies and documents, sort the inbox, draft the first version of a quote or report, and pull data out of PDFs and forms. Built by JFI for BC businesses, on business accounts whose terms don’t let anyone train on your data.
- 01A fixed price for version one
- 02You own the code and the data
- 03Working software early, in stages
- 04Same business day reply
Less copying, less searching, fewer blank pages.
Most small businesses have tried a chatbot and come away unsure what to do with it. The useful part isn’t a general chatbot. It’s an assistant that knows your price list, your procedures and your past jobs, sitting inside the tools your people already open every morning.
We start with one task that eats hours every week, build an assistant that does the dull part of it, and keep a person in charge of the result. If the answer turns out to be a setting in Microsoft 365 or a product you can buy today, we’ll tell you that instead.
Five kinds of AI assistant small businesses get the most from.
Each one is scoped as a fixed-price first version, so you know what it will do and what it costs before any work starts.
- 01
Answers from your own documents
Handbooks, policies, product specs, job notes and past proposals, searchable in plain language. Staff ask a question and get an answer with a link to the page it came from.
- 02
Email and ticket triage
Incoming messages sorted, tagged and routed to the right person, with a suggested reply waiting. Nothing is sent without someone approving it.
- 03
First drafts
Quotes, job reports, follow-up emails and meeting summaries drafted from the notes you already take, ready for a person to check and send.
- 04
Document extraction
Invoices, delivery slips, intake forms and PDFs read automatically, with the fields filed into your accounting, CRM or spreadsheet.
- 05
Copilot and ChatGPT rollout
Business accounts set up properly, access matched to roles, and a short AI use policy so your people know what’s fine to paste in and what isn’t.
- 06
Assistants for your customers
Chat or reply assistants that work from approved answers, with anything sensitive or negative routed to a person first.
Private by design, not by hope.
We use business accounts and APIs whose terms don’t allow your data to be used to train anyone’s model. The assistant only sees the documents and systems it needs, and access follows the same roles as the rest of your IT, signed in with Microsoft 365 where that fits.
Every assistant comes with a plain description of what it can see, where its data is stored and who can use it. That’s the page your insurer, a client’s security questionnaire or your own lawyer will ask for.
How we handle security
We run an AI product of our own.
ReplyChamp is an AI product JFI built and operates: it drafts replies to Google reviews for local businesses, and holds anything negative for a person to approve before it goes out. It runs on Next.js, Supabase and Cloudflare Workers.
That human-approval step is the same pattern we put into client assistants. The AI does the typing; a person makes the call on anything that matters.
Read the ReplyChamp case studyFrom one task to a working assistant.
1. Discovery
We sit with the people doing the work, look at the documents, inboxes and tools involved, and find where the hours actually go. The outcome is a short written scope: what the assistant will do, what it won’t, what it runs on and what it costs.
2. A fixed-price first version
The price for version one is agreed in writing and doesn’t move unless the scope does. A single assistant or automation is often live in one to three weeks. See how pricing works.
3. Short cycles, real testing
You try it on real examples as it comes together. We tune the instructions and sources until the answers are right often enough to be useful, and we tell you plainly where it still needs a person.
4. Launch and after
We train the people using it and hand over the documentation. You own the code, the data and the accounts it runs on. Hosting, updates and changes afterwards are available from JFI, never required.
You deal with JFI directly, before and after launch.
The company that scopes and builds your software is the one you call when it needs a change or something stops working. No sales handoff, no account manager in the middle, no support desk that has never seen the code.
- 01
One point of contact, start to finish
The conversation that starts in discovery carries on through the build and after launch. You don’t re-explain your business to a project manager, then a developer, then a support desk.
- 02
Support from the company that wrote the code
When something needs fixing or changing, it comes back to JFI, which built it and wrote the documentation, not to a third party learning your system on your time.
- 03
Changes as the business changes
New fields, a new report, another integration. Small changes and bigger next stages are scoped and agreed with you before work starts.
- 04
Next to the rest of your IT
If JFI also looks after your IT, your software sits inside the same support: the same number to call and a first response the same business day.
Not locked in, either: you own the code, the data and the documentation. How JFI builds and supports custom software.
Related work JFI builds.
Most projects combine more than one of these. All of them are built on a fixed scope for the first version, and you own what we build. See all custom solutions.
Replace spreadsheets with an app
The shared spreadsheet everyone is afraid to touch, rebuilt as a proper tool with logins, history and forms.
Replace spreadsheetsIntegrations & workflow automation
Microsoft 365, QuickBooks, your CRM and scheduling, talking to each other instead of through copy and paste.
IntegrationsCustom business dashboards
The numbers you check every week, pulled from the systems they live in and put on one screen.
DashboardsOur work
What we’ve built and run, including ReplyChamp, the AI review-reply product JFI built and operates.
See our workAI assistants, the short answers.
01What can an AI assistant do for a small business?
02Is our data safe with AI tools?
03Do we need Microsoft Copilot or ChatGPT, or something custom?
04What if the AI gets something wrong?
05How much does an AI assistant cost?
06Can you write an AI use policy for our staff?
Tell us which task eats the most time.
A couple of sentences about the job you’d hand to an assistant is enough to start. Which tools and documents are involved helps. We’ll come back the same business day with a time to talk, or book a free scoping call directly.
- Hours
- 8am–5pm, 7 days a week
- Where we work
- Vancouver, Burnaby, Richmond, Surrey, New Westminster, Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody, Delta, North Vancouver, Maple Ridge, Pitt Meadows, Langley and Abbotsford. Remote support anywhere in BC.
- What clients say
- Read our reviews on Google ↗