Agents that save your teams time, tested before they are plugged in, supervised once they are live.
Home > AI agent development for small businesses
Sekoia handles AI agent development for small and mid-sized businesses: agents built into the tools you already use (CRM, email, customer service), custom agents, and assistants that answer your customers from your official content. Every agent starts from a single task, relies on clean data, passes a measured series of tests before going live, and stays under the supervision of someone on your team.
A chatbot answers a question. An agent acts: it reads a request, checks your CRM, drafts a reply, updates a record. That's useful when the task comes back often, its rules fit in a few lines and its result is easy to check. Qualifying inbound requests, answering frequent questions from your documents, preparing follow-ups, keeping the CRM clean: that's where an agent earns its keep. Deciding a refund or a price offer on its own, no. We'll tell you before we build anything.
An agent is only as good as the information you give it. Before quoting an assistant that answers your customers, we read your site and your documents page by page: what is up to date, what contradicts itself, what is missing. You get the list of content to fix, with the points that would directly skew the agent's answers. Sorry, it's not the most spectacular part, but it's the part that decides the quality of the answers. The choice of tool and model comes next, based on your constraints: where your data lives, where it must be hosted, which languages the agent answers in and what each request costs. We recommend the simplest option that does the job, not the newest one.
No imposed model: we choose the model based on the task, where your data lives, the languages and the cost per request, then we test it on your own questions.
Agents that read long documents, reason and act in your tools.
When your contacts, deals and customer service live in HubSpot.
A European provider, when data hosting and sovereignty matter.
Conversational assistants and agents for your teams and your customers.
When your business works in Microsoft 365: Outlook, Teams, SharePoint.
When your business works in Google Workspace: Gmail, Drive, Docs.
Claude, Breeze, Mistral, ChatGPT, Copilot and Gemini are trademarks of their respective owners. Their mention does not imply any endorsement or sponsorship by them.
We don't put an agent live because the demo was convincing. We first build a set of at least 50 questions: questions whose answer is in your content, off-topic or personal questions it must politely decline, and attempts to hijack it. The agent runs this set in a test environment, and it only goes live if our thresholds are met: every answer cites its source, at least 90% of answers are faithful to your content, and 100% of out-of-scope or trick questions are handled correctly. If not, we fix and run it again.
An agent that talks to your customers commits your business. We build it with guardrails written in code, not only in its instructions: an "AI assistant" notice visible from the first message, no personal data requested, handoff to a person as soon as the question falls outside its scope, permissions opened step by step (read, then drafts, then sending). We take Quebec's Law 25 into account, which governs decisions based exclusively on automated processing, and we follow the agent every month: unanswered questions, handoffs to a human, actual cost. Your teams are trained to supervise it and make it evolve.
Share of Canadian businesses using AI in the second quarter of 2026, up from 6.1% in 2024. (Statistics Canada, Canadian Survey on Business Conditions, 2026)
Share of Canadian businesses with 1 to 4 employees using AI in the second quarter of 2026: very small businesses are not lagging behind. (Statistics Canada, Canadian Survey on Business Conditions, 2026)
Gartner predicts that over 40% of agentic AI projects will be canceled by the end of 2027, due to unclear business value or inadequate risk controls. (Gartner, press release of June 25, 2025)
It takes over a repetitive, well-bounded task: qualifying inbound requests, answering frequent questions from your documents, preparing sales follow-ups, keeping the CRM clean or gathering the numbers for a report. It acts in your tools, within the permissions you give it, and someone on your team keeps control over anything that commits the business.
If the task lives entirely in a tool you already use, your CRM or customer service platform for example, start with the agents that tool offers: they work on the data you already have. A custom agent makes sense when the task spans several tools, when your content lives elsewhere, or when you need to choose the model and data hosting yourself.
Through measured tests, not a demo. We write at least 50 test questions with you, including off-topic questions and hijacking attempts. The agent only leaves the test environment if every answer cites its source, at least 90% of answers are faithful to your content and every trick question is handled correctly.
Your business. In 2024, a British Columbia tribunal held Air Canada responsible for wrong information given by the chatbot on its website. That's why our agents cite their sources, hand off to a person as soon as a question falls outside their scope, and show an "AI assistant" notice from the first message.
Yes, as soon as an agent processes personal information. Section 12.1 covers decisions based exclusively on automated processing: the person must be informed and be able to ask for a review by a human. We design agents to prepare decisions rather than make them alone. For advice on your situation, consult a lawyer.
With a single task, described in one sentence, with its weekly volume. Together we look at whether an agent is the right answer, what needs fixing in your content or data before building it, and how to measure the result. To get up to speed before calling us, read our article on AI agents for small businesses.
Sekoia is a lean growth agency that helps small and medium-sized businesses perform better in highly competitive markets. Pioneers in Generative Engine Optimization (GEO) in Quebec.
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