What an "AI employee" actually costs around here

Sooner or later somebody offers to run an AI setup for your shop for a monthly fee. It is not a scam and it is also not magic. The whole thing comes down to two questions, and most owners ask neither one.

What is actually being sold

Somebody sets up and babysits a handful of automated jobs for you: answering after hours, chasing quotes, replying to reviews, following up with people who went quiet. The AI part is real. The service part, the babysitting, is most of what you are paying for, and that is fine as long as you know it.

The real range in a small Georgia town

A few hundred a month is the honest band for a small local shop. Meaningfully under that and nobody is monitoring anything. Meaningfully over it and you are paying agency prices for small-town work, unless there is a genuine person doing genuine hours in there.

Question one: what does it replace

If the honest answer is "nothing, it is extra," it is a cost. If the answer is "the four hours you spend on the phone after close" or "the jobs you lose when nobody picks up," then compare it to that number, not to zero.

Question two: what happens the week it goes wrong

It will. A text will go to the wrong person, or a reply will sound like a robot to somebody's grandmother. Ask who notices, how fast, and who fixes it. If the answer is you, you did not buy a service, you bought software.

Ask for the ledger

Any service worth paying monthly should be able to tell you, every month, what it did and what that was worth. Calls answered, quotes chased, reviews replied to. If nobody can produce that list, you have no way to know whether to keep paying, and you will keep paying anyway. That is how these end.

The cheaper first move

Before any of this, turn on a missed-call text. It is free, it takes ten minutes, and it does the single most valuable thing on most of these packages. If that has been running for three months and you still need more, now you are having an informed conversation.

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