Custom AI for a small business: where do I start?

What is an AI agent, in practice?

It's an assistant assigned to one specific job in your company. You ask it a question or ask it for a document, and it takes care of it.

What sets it apart from a consumer chatbot is what it knows. It has read your documents, so it knows your clients, your projects, your methods and who worked on what. When it answers, it cites the document the information came from, so you can check.

What can it do for a small business?

Good first jobs are the ones that come up often and send people digging through old files. For example:

• Drafting a sales proposal based on the ones you've already sent
• Preparing meeting or project notes
• Answering a client with the right documents attached
• Finding out who worked with which client, and on which project
• Preparing a response to a request for proposal from your past work

What do we need to get started?

Your documents, where they already live: SharePoint, OneDrive or Dropbox. You don't have to sort or reformat anything.

You also need a rough idea of what eats up your team's time. No spec required: it gets sharper as you talk it through with our engineers.

There's no server to install. If your IT requirements call for it, Saména can also run on your own servers or on a dedicated instance.

Who builds the agents?

Saména's engineers, Télécom Paris graduates who specialize in artificial intelligence. They start by learning how you work: your line of business, your clients, what slows you down.

Then they build your first agents and show them to you. You try them on real cases, tell them what's missing, and they adjust.

Which tools do they work in?

In the Saména app, where the agent already knows your documents, with no copy-pasting. Your team can also reach it from Claude, ChatGPT or Copilot if they already use them.

Your files stay in SharePoint, OneDrive or Dropbox. Saména keeps no copy of them, and what it does retain is encrypted with a key unique to your company.

How do I know if it is worth it?

Look at the tasks that come back every week: hunting for a document, reworking an old proposal, writing up a meeting. If they keep your team busy, a first agent has plenty to do.

The surest way to tell is to see it on your own documents. In a demo, we show you what an agent gets out of them, on your real use cases, before you commit to anything.

On cost: there's a one-time setup fee, then a monthly subscription for the whole company, with unlimited users. You can start with one department and a single agent.

Frequently asked

Do we need technical skills in-house?

No. Your team asks questions the way they would ask a coworker. Our engineers handle the technical side.

Will our documents be used to train an AI?

No. The models that read your data are European (Mistral), and their contract forbids them from training on it. Servers are in France, and the database is in the European Union.

What happens when we add new documents?

They join your agents' memory, and the agents use them in their next answers.

Is this only for certain industries?

No. Saména works with companies in automotive (a network of repair shops), environmental engineering and consulting. Each agent is built for the company's own line of work.