A few years ago a friend who runs a beauty studio told me she'd missed three potential bookings in a single Saturday because she was elbow-deep in someone's gel manicure when the phone rang. She lost about £200 of work that day to voicemail.
She'd tried two “AI receptionist” tools. Both sounded robotic. Both made her customers ask “is this a real person?”. Both wanted her to fill in a 50-field form on a website and then trust the bot.
So I started Workhand to do the opposite — sit with one customer at a time, learn how they actually talk, build the AI to match, then watch every reply for the first three weeks until it's right. — properly fitted, not flat-pack.
It's a small operation. As I write this, Workhand has a handful of customers and one founder (me). Every one of those customers spent 60 minutes on a call with me before signing up. None of them got a chatbot demo. Most of them are still my first port of call when something needs to change.
What Workhand isn't: it's not a try-before-you-buy SaaS. There's no free trial — there's a £299/month subscription with 30 days of human onboarding built in, and a no-questions-asked cancellation if it's not working.
What Workhand isn't (part 2): it's not a thing where the AI pretends to be human. Workhand introduces itself as Workhand. Anyone can ask “am I talking to a person?” and the answer is honest. We've found customers prefer this — the AI being upfront about being AI removes the “wait, is this fake?” tension that other tools create.
What Workhand is: the back office of a small business, run by a piece of software that sounds like you on a good day, watched by a human (me, for now) until you trust it.