AI as Your Silent Employee:

🍽️ Local Insight of the Week

Sleep doesn’t mean your business has to stop working. In fact, AI can keep your shop productive 24/7. Take the Surrey-based dog groomer who recently installed an AI-powered scheduling tool on her website. Now, 40% of her appointments come in overnight.

When customers browse late at night, your tech should be awake. Whether it’s booking, lead capture, or customer service — smart automation doesn’t clock out.

📌 Quick Action: Try this prompt in ChatGPT: “Act as a local business coach. Suggest 3 automations that work while I’m off-duty.”

🔍 Your AI Edge

3 Overnight Automations You Can Set Up in a Day

1. Auto-Reply + Booking via Facebook — Set up Meta's built-in chatbot to greet DMs after hours and share a booking link.

2. AI Lead Capture on Your Website — Use Chatbase or Gobot to turn your FAQ into a chatbot that collects emails at 2 am.

3. Email Funnels with ChatGPT + MailerLite — Draft a 3-part welcome series and load it into an autoresponder. It runs while you rest.

Real example: A Richmond pilates studio set this up last month and saw 17 new email subscribers overnight from a single Facebook promo.

📌 Try This: Use MailerLite’s free AI email writer to create a welcome email. Connect it to your website popup. 🔗 https://www.mailerlite.com

🧢 Tool of the Week

Name: Chatbase — Train a Bot on Your Website FAQ

What it Does: Upload your FAQ or help content, and Chatbase builds a chatbot that can answer common customer questions instantly. It stays up while you sleep and replies like a mini-you. You can also teach it, as questions come in, your bot does not have the answer, you can add it for future questions.

Best For: Any service business with frequent customer questions (salons, studios, clinics, etc.)

💰 Free trial available, then from $19/month
🔗 https://www.chatbase.co

We have a chatbot on Butterfly Networking. Take it for a test drive. https://ButterflyNetworking.ca

📣 Real Talk: Local Wins

When Lisa, owner of a North Vancouver juice bar, noticed she was losing leads outside business hours, she added a chatbot with email capture to her site. Within 10 days, it gathered 83 new emails — all overnight.

“I used to think of my site like a static flyer,” she says. “Now it’s like a sales assistant who never sleeps.”

📌 Bonus Tip: In ChatGPT, try: “Create a chatbot script to help customers choose between juice cleanse options.”

📦 This Week’s Takeaway Checklist

✅ Set up at least one 24/7 AI automation this week
✅ Use Chatbase or Facebook auto-replies for customer FAQs
✅ Capture emails while you sleep with MailerLite or popups
✅ Think of your website as a silent employee — train it