Give your AI assistant a job, not your office manager's access

An AI assistant can use every permission you give it. So give it a job before you give it a login.

Most owners take the quick route and connect the assistant through a person's existing account. That account can do everything the person can do, and the assistant can do the same.

When you connect an assistant to your inbox or your schedule, it works with the permissions of the account behind it. If that account can reply to any email, the assistant can reply to any email. If it can move any booking, the assistant can move any booking.

Your instructions say what you hope it will do. The access says what it can do. When a message does not fit the instructions, the access decides what happens.

Hope is not a permission setting.

What happens at a 12-person plumbing and heating contractor¶

A 12-person plumbing and heating contractor connects an assistant to the office inbox and the scheduling system. Its job is to book routine service calls: a furnace tune-up, a dripping tap, a water heater check.

It is set up with the office manager's full access, so it does more than book calls. It replies to a customer's billing dispute. It moves a confirmed emergency job to make room for a routine one.

Nobody told it to do either. Nothing stopped it either.

The owner narrows its job. Now the assistant books routine calls into open slots only. For anything else, it writes a draft for the office manager. The problem stops.

The assistant did not get smarter. Its job got smaller.

Write the job in one sentence before you connect anything¶

Start with a sentence a new hire could follow: "Book routine service calls into open slots in the schedule." If you cannot write that sentence, the assistant is not ready to connect.

Then list what falls outside the sentence. Billing. Complaints. Emergencies. Changes to confirmed jobs. A person handles each of these.

Give it only the actions that job needs¶

Match the access to the sentence. For the contractor, the assistant needs to read the inbox, see open slots and create a booking in an empty slot. It does not need to edit or cancel existing bookings. It does not need to answer questions about money.

Where your software allows it, give the assistant its own account with only those permissions. Do not reuse a person's login. With its own account, the log shows which actions the assistant took and which a person took.

If your software cannot limit the actions this way, keep the assistant on drafts only until it can.

Everything outside the job becomes a draft for a person¶

Drafts keep the help and remove the risk. The assistant still reads the billing dispute and writes a suggested reply. The office manager reads it, edits it, and decides whether to send it.

An emergency works the same way. The assistant flags the request and drafts a note. A person decides which job moves.

Inside the job, it acts. Outside the job, it drafts.

Check the job before you add a second one¶

Before you widen the job, check the first one with three questions:

Did every booking land in a slot that was open?
Did any message outside the job get a reply that no person approved?
Can a named person turn the assistant off today, without help?

If the answers stay clean for a few weeks, add the next job as its own sentence with its own access. Do not add more access to the first job.

One job at a time. One sentence each.

Keep exploring¶

To find out which jobs in your business are ready for an assistant and what access each one needs, start the AI Readiness Audit or contact FIT.