You would not hand a new office manager a key to every room, no job description and no one to report to, then leave for a week. Yet that is how a lot of AI assistants get switched on.

That matters more now, because the newest ones do not wait to be asked.

The assistant that keeps working

At its DevDay event in late September, OpenAI announced “dots,” which WIRED describes as always-on AI agents that complete tasks on a user’s behalf. Reuters reports they run on their own cloud computers, and WIRED says they connect to your apps and act proactively. In one of OpenAI’s demos, a dot saw that its user was working through dinner and suggested food delivery on its own.

The safety design is worth knowing. According to WIRED and Reuters, dots ask for approval before sensitive steps, like installing software or changing a password, and you can set your own rules about what they may do and when they must ask. They started rolling out on ChatGPT’s $100-a-month Pro plan.

Whether or not you ever use a dot, tools like it are coming to the apps you already pay for. The question for a shop owner is not which assistant is smartest. It is how you would bring one into your business without regretting it.

The simplest answer: hire it the way you would hire a person.

A made-up example

Here is a made-up example. A landscaping company switches on an AI assistant connected to its inbox and calendar, with no limits set. It is helpful for a week. Then it notices a gap in Thursday’s schedule and moves two customer visits to fill it, sending both customers a new time.

Nothing broke. It did what it thought was useful. But the crew was already planning around the old times, and the owner found out when a customer called to confirm. Nobody had decided whether the assistant was allowed to change customer appointments. So it decided for itself.

Hire it like a person

Before you switch one on, work through the same six steps you would for a new hire.

  1. Write the job description. One job, one result. “Sort new estimate requests and draft a reply for me to approve” is a job. “Help with the office” is not.
  2. Hand out a badge, not a master key. Give it access only to the apps and folders that job needs. Start with read-only where you can, and add more only when the job proves it needs it.
  3. Name its manager. One person on your team reviews its work and answers for it. Not “the office.” A name.
  4. Write the “always ask first” list. Anything that reaches a customer, changes the schedule, moves money or deletes something. Use the tool’s own rules or approval settings to make those steps wait for a person.
  5. Give it a trial period. Thirty days. Each week, the manager answers three questions: what did it do well, what did someone have to redo, and did it save real time?
  6. Know how to let it go. Write down, before day one, how to switch it off, which app connections to remove, and what happens to anything it was in the middle of.

If any of these is hard to answer, that is the step to finish before you switch it on.

Rent it or build it

A ready-made assistant can be the right call for personal, low-stakes work: research, drafting, reminders for you. For the repeatable work that touches your customers and your records, like quote follow-up, intake and invoicing, an automation built around your own process is often a better fit. You decide exactly what it does, it runs in your own accounts, and it does not change when a vendor changes its plans.

Either way, the six steps are the same. The difference is who writes the job description: you, or the vendor.

Your one step this week: if you already use an AI assistant connected to your email or calendar, write its job description in one sentence and its “always ask first” list. Then check its settings match. If you have not switched one on yet, do those two things first.

If you want help deciding what to rent and what to build, here is what we build.

Sources

Kush AI Automation builds in accounts you own, and our monitoring alerts when a run fails and when it never starts, so an automation that quietly stops still reaches a person. Bring the job you would hand over first and book a free call.