Your Website Can Answer Questions. But Can It Understand Opportunities?

I've been building businesses for a long time.

And one thing hasn't changed very much.

When someone walks into a business, a good salesperson doesn't immediately start telling them everything they sell.

They usually do something much simpler.

They ask a question.

"What brings you in?"

Then they listen.

Somewhere along the way, when we moved so much of business online, we lost a little of that.

Our websites became very good at presenting information.

Services. About. Testimonials. Articles. Contact. Book a call.

And today they can tell us almost everything about our traffic.

How many people visited. Where they came from. Which pages they viewed. What they clicked.

But there's something most websites still don't know.

Why did that person come?

One visitor might be casually browsing.

Another might have exactly the problem your business solves.

Unless that second person fills out a form, sends an email or books a call, you may never know they were there.

I think that's beginning to change.

We've always made the visitor figure it out

Think about the typical website for a consultant, advisor, coach or professional.

Someone arrives because something isn't working.

Maybe their business has stopped growing.

Maybe they're thinking about leaving corporate life.

Maybe they've accumulated decades of experience and are wondering whether they could turn that knowledge into something of their own.

They know something needs to change.

They just don't necessarily know what they need yet.

And then the website gives them a menu.

Services. About. Resources. Contact.

The visitor is expected to diagnose their own problem, choose the appropriate service and decide whether they're ready to talk to someone.

That's a lot to ask.

Because people don't always arrive with solutions.

They arrive with situations.

And situations usually require a conversation.

Chatbots were a useful first step

Website chat helped.

Instead of searching through pages, someone could ask:

"What services do you offer?"

"What does it cost?"

"How do I book?"

Generative AI has made those conversations considerably better.

But I've become interested in a different question.

What if the website didn't just answer the question? What if it tried to understand why the person was asking?

Imagine someone types:

"I'm thinking about starting a consulting business."

One response might be:

"Great. Here are our consulting services."

Useful.

But imagine the response was:

"What are you hoping consulting will give you that your current work doesn't?"

Now we're somewhere different.

We're not immediately trying to sell something.

We're trying to understand.

That difference may look small.

I think it's actually quite significant.

What is an AI Business Advisor?

At Design Yourself, we've started using the term AI Business Advisor for a particular way of applying conversational AI.

Here's what we mean:

An AI Business Advisor is a conversational AI system built around a business's expertise, services and customer journey. It helps visitors think through what they need, explores potential fit and helps bring better-informed conversations to the business owner.

There are plenty of names appearing across this industry.

Chatbots. AI assistants. AI agents. Sales agents. Conversational AI.

I'm less interested in arguing about what we call everything than I am in asking:

What does it actually do for the customer and the business?

Because putting a powerful AI model on a website isn't enough.

The AI doesn't automatically understand your business.

It doesn't automatically know who you serve best.

What you offer.

What you charge.

What you don't do.

What questions you would normally ask.

When you would recommend one service instead of another.

Or when you would simply say:

"I don't think we're the right fit."

That's where the business owner's expertise becomes important.

The difference isn't just technology

Here's the simplest way I think about it.

These aren't rigid technical categories. Today's AI systems overlap considerably.

For me, the difference is really about intent.

Are we trying to answer someone's question as quickly as possible?

Or are we trying to understand enough about that person to actually help them?

What if your website could listen?

Imagine someone visits the website of a management consultant and says:

"My business is growing, but I'm overwhelmed and everything still depends on me."

The website could send them to a Services page.

A chatbot could explain operational consulting.

Or an Advisor could ask:

"What's taking most of your time right now?"

Maybe it's employees.

Maybe it's systems.

Maybe it's sales.

Maybe the owner has never learned to delegate.

Maybe they don't even know.

That's okay.

The Advisor doesn't have to diagnose the entire business.

It simply needs to understand enough to make the next step more useful.

And if the visitor eventually wants to talk with the consultant, imagine the difference between receiving this:

Sarah M.

sarah@email.com

and knowing:

Sarah runs a growing professional-services business. Everything still depends heavily on her. She wants more capacity over the next six months but isn't sure whether she needs additional people or better systems. She's exploring possibilities rather than looking for an immediate solution.

I'd much rather begin the conversation with the second one.

The AI hasn't decided Sarah is a customer.

It has provided context.

The human still decides what that context means.

So what's the real benefit?

I see several.

Your expertise becomes more available

You can't be everywhere.

You might be working with another client, at the gym, travelling, having dinner or sleeping.

Someone can still begin exploring your business.

That's different from replacing you.

It's making access to what you know easier.

The first step becomes less intimidating

Not everyone is ready to book a call.

Sometimes people want to understand something before they put their name on your calendar.

A conversation gives them that space.

You can enter human conversations better prepared

Instead of spending the first part of a meeting figuring out why someone is there, you may already understand their situation.

That means you can spend more time actually helping them.

Your existing website traffic may become more valuable

We spend a lot of time trying to get more people to our websites.

SEO. Social media. Advertising. Email. Content.

But I've started wondering whether we sometimes overlook the people already there.

Maybe the next opportunity isn't always:

Get more traffic.

Maybe it's:

Understand more of the traffic you already have.

Your business can communicate more consistently

An Advisor can work from approved information about your services, pricing and boundaries.

That doesn't make it perfect.

But it gives the system something much better than improvisation.

Early conversations can scale

You can only personally have so many introductory conversations.

AI can help with the early exploration without requiring you to participate in every one.

People can feel understood before they're sold to

This may be my favourite one.

I've spent much of my career in businesses built around people.

And regardless of how much technology changes, I don't think this changes:

People want to feel understood.

Efficiency matters.

But so does the experience.

I don't want AI replacing the relationship

There's a lot of discussion about how many jobs AI can replace.

That's not the part that interests me most.

I'm more interested in:

How can AI make someone better at what they're already good at?

AI can be very useful for early exploration, information, repetitive questions, summarizing and gathering context.

But there are things I still want people doing.

Judgment. Empathy. Trust. Relationships. Negotiation. Complex decisions.

Knowing when something just doesn't feel right.

The goal isn't to automate people out of the business.

It's to use technology so people can spend more time doing the work where being human actually matters.

That's very different.

And yes, AI can get this wrong

I'm excited about this technology.

I'm not blind to its problems.

An AI Advisor can recommend something too quickly.

It can misunderstand.

It can make something up.

It can sound more certain than it should.

It can collect information it doesn't need.

It can make reaching a real person unnecessarily difficult.

And if the business hasn't designed it carefully, it can become another annoying layer between the customer and the person they actually want to reach.

That's not progress.

That's why I've learned that the AI model is only part of the equation.

The knowledge matters.

The instructions matter.

The boundaries matter.

Consent matters.

Testing matters.

And ultimately:

The human matters.

What we learned building Maya

This is where the story became personal for me.

Design Yourself is built around three stages:

START. BUILD. GROW.

START helps experienced adults figure out what they want to do next.

BUILD helps them turn what they know into something of their own.

GROW helps them find better opportunities and customers.

Simple enough.

Except a visitor might arrive at Design Yourself and think:

"I don't know which one I need."

And that got me thinking.

Why should they have to figure that out before we help them?

So we built Maya, Design Yourself's AI Business Advisor.

And building her taught me something.

Some of our most important decisions weren't technical decisions at all.

We didn't want Maya recommending START, BUILD or GROW after hearing one sentence.

Understand first. Recommend later.

We wanted to distinguish between what someone actually told Maya and what the AI interpreted.

A fact and an interpretation aren't the same thing.

We didn't want Maya inventing prices, promises or capabilities.

If the business hasn't approved it, the AI shouldn't make it up.

And if someone wants to speak with me?

Maya shouldn't make that harder.

She should make the handoff better.

That's also where one of the philosophies behind Design Yourself comes into play:

Be a Learn It All, not a Know It All.

We didn't start building Maya because we had all the answers about AI.

We built her because we wanted to learn.

We tested.

We found problems.

We changed things.

We tested again.

And we're still learning.

That's how I think experienced people should approach AI.

Not:

"I need to become an AI expert."

But:

"What could this technology help me do better?"

That's a much more useful question.

Is an AI Business Advisor right for every business?

No.

And I think that's important to say.

If customers arrive knowing exactly which product they want, a good ecommerce experience may be enough.

If nearly every question has a straightforward answer, a conventional support tool might work perfectly well.

Where I see the biggest opportunity is in expertise-driven businesses.

Consultants. Advisors. Coaches. Fractional executives. Professional-service firms. Travel advisors. Wellness professionals. Independent experts. Personal brands.

Businesses where the customer often arrives knowing they have a problem but doesn't necessarily know which solution they need.

In those businesses:

Understanding has value.

The intelligent front door

I don't think websites are going away.

I think they're becoming more interesting.

We've spent years making them look better.

Then making them easier to find.

Then making them convert better.

Now we're beginning to ask whether they can become more useful participants in the customer experience.

Can the website listen?

Can it understand?

Can it help?

Can it recognize when a human should enter the conversation?

That's what I mean when I describe the next generation of the business website as an:

Intelligent front door.

Not a robot salesperson.

Not an autonomous business.

A better entrance into the expertise that already exists inside the company.

And I keep coming back to one idea:

AI shouldn't replace your expertise. It should help you do more with what you know.

Maybe the best AI Business Advisor won't be the one that eliminates the most human conversations.

Maybe it will be the one that helps you find the conversations worth having.

Curious what this actually feels like?

We built Maya because I wanted to experience this technology inside my own business before offering it to somebody else's.

You can do the same.

Talk with Maya →

And if you're wondering what an AI Business Advisor built around your expertise might look like:

Explore the AI Business Advisor →

Questions people ask

What is an AI Business Advisor?

An AI Business Advisor is a conversational AI system built around a business's expertise, services and customer journey. It helps visitors explore what they need, understand potential fit and find an appropriate next step.

How is an AI Business Advisor different from a chatbot?

Before deciding that this is what your business needs, it is worth asking where the next growth opportunity in your business actually is — technology is only the right answer once the opportunity is clear.

There's increasing overlap between today's AI systems. The distinction we're making is primarily about purpose. A chatbot is often designed around answering questions or completing specific tasks. An AI Business Advisor is designed to understand the visitor's situation before determining what information, service or human conversation may be useful.

Can AI qualify potential customers?

AI can help identify signals of potential fit by understanding stated needs, goals, circumstances and timing. It shouldn't be treated as infallible. The human business owner should retain final judgment about whether an opportunity is genuinely qualified.

Does an AI Business Advisor replace the business owner or salesperson?

That's not how we believe it should be used. AI can help with early exploration, information and context while people focus on judgment, relationships, trust and higher-value conversations.

What businesses are best suited to an AI Business Advisor?

Businesses where customers often know they have a problem but don't necessarily know which service or solution they need. Consultants, advisors and other expertise-driven businesses are particularly interesting examples.