AI Business Assistant

Question

Can a small AI assistant meaningfully reduce the operational burden on a Nigerian SME — without requiring the owner to learn new software?

Hypothesis

Most Nigerian SMEs run on WhatsApp. Customer inquiries arrive 24/7. The owner answers every message personally — inquiries, orders, complaints, logistics. This is unsustainable, but hiring staff for it is expensive.

An AI assistant, integrated into the SME’s existing WhatsApp workflow, could:

• Handle common inquiries automatically
• Route complex questions to the owner
• Capture order details
• Answer product questions from a knowledge base

Approach

• Integrate with WhatsApp Cloud API
• Ground the assistant in the SME’s actual product catalogue and policies
• Design strict hand-off rules — anything ambiguous goes to the human
• Measure: response time, resolution rate, owner time saved

Current State

Early research. Building a minimal prototype to test on a small set of real inquiries from a real business.

What’s Next

• Ship a private prototype to PrimeShieldHub’s customer service workflow
• Measure reduction in response time and owner hours spent
• Decide: worth productizing, or keep as internal tool?

Why This Matters

The premise of Savflux is that ideas become technology. Not “AI is cool” — but here is a specific problem, and here is a specific system that solves it. This experiment tests whether the system actually solves the problem.