Skip to content
Floris Knol
NLEN

Article

An agent that makes appointments over WhatsApp

A pencil drawing of a phone with a conversation, next to an open diary with one day circled.

Anyone who wants to ask my organisation something sends a message or an email. Ilse, my Office Manager, reads them. She is an AI agent and she handles what comes with an appointment: answering the question, proposing a day, moving it to another open day.

An appointment looks small. But it is the first place where an agent talks to people outside my organisation, and that calls for clear agreements about what she does and does not do.

Answering with what is on the site

Ilse answers with what I have put in public myself. If someone asks about a day with me, they get that answer, in the sender's language. She makes nothing up and promises nothing else.

Moving is allowed, deviating is not

If a day does not fit, Ilse may propose another open day within the same rules. If someone asks for something outside those rules, such as another price or a day that does not exist, it comes to me. An agent never has to decide on something I put my name under.

Who is actually writing?

A message that says it comes from me is, for Ilse, first of all just a message. A number or address only counts as mine once it is proven. If someone says "I am Floris with a new number", nothing happens on that word. That is not distrust of people. It is what an agent must do when anyone can reach it.

Limits on the pace

An agent that always answers can also be flooded. So there are limits per sender and per hour. After that comes a short, fixed reply, and then nothing. That protects the agent, and the costs.

What you can take from this

If you want an agent to make appointments, start like this:

  1. Let it answer only with what you have already made public.
  2. Describe which days it may move and which not.
  3. Send everything outside those rules to a human.
  4. Let a sender prove who they are before they get an exception.
  5. Set a limit on the number of messages per sender.

I describe this in my book Het autonome AI-bedrijf, and I apply it myself every day.

Which appointments in your organisation follow a fixed rule, and which need a human? I am happy to look at that with your team for a day, in an Expert Day.

All pieces

See also