Agent, assistant, chatbot, which one?
Three things people confuse, three different price points, three different outcomes. The shortest answer for an SMB: chatbots are mostly cosmetic, assistants help you, agents do work for you.
Sits in a chat window on a website. You type, it answers. It doesn't go do anything.
A smart copilot inside your existing tool. You stay in the driver's seat; it suggests + does small tasks.
Software that picks tools, takes actions, crosses systems, and loops. You give it a goal once.
Every SMB owner has had this conversation: someone says "we should get AI" and someone else says "we already have AI, the chatbot on our website." Both are right and both are missing the point. The chatbot, the assistant, and the agent are all "AI," but they do completely different things and cost completely different amounts.
The chatbot
A chatbot is a chat window on a website that answers questions. It usually lives inside a customer-support widget. It can route inquiries to the right form, look up FAQ answers, and tell someone what your business hours are. That's where the chatbot's job ends.
It doesn't read your email, doesn't update your CRM, doesn't book meetings, doesn't follow up. Most chatbots can't even remember your customer between visits. If your business is mostly answering FAQs at the customer touchpoint, a chatbot is genuinely useful and cheap. If your business is anything more complex than that, a chatbot doesn't move the needle.
Price band: $0-$50/month, included in most customer-support SaaS subscriptions.
The AI assistant
An AI assistant is a smart helper that lives inside a tool you already use. Gmail's "Help me write." Notion AI. ChatGPT itself, kind of. You stay in the driver's seat and the assistant suggests edits, drafts content, summarizes documents, answers questions about your data.
The assistant is reactive. It waits for you to ask. When you ask, it's often really good. When you don't ask, it sits there. Most assistants are confined to one app (Gmail's assistant doesn't talk to your CRM). They're useful exactly to the degree that the work you do is inside that one app.
Price band: $20-$50/user/month for the standalone tools (ChatGPT Plus, Claude Pro), or bundled into the SaaS you already pay for.
The AI agent
An AI agent does work for you across tools, on its own. Once it's set up, you don't ask it anything. It just runs, on schedule or in response to triggers. It reads your inbox, decides what to do, calls the right APIs (CRM, calendar, doc system), drafts the work, and either acts directly or queues the result for you to approve.
The agent is the only one of the three that actually shrinks your weekly hours. The chatbot fields customer questions you weren't doing anyway. The assistant makes existing work slightly faster. The agent removes whole stretches of admin work from your week.
Price band: $2,995-$4,995 once for a productized starter agent. $10k-$50k for a custom build. $497/month for a recurring agent with maintenance (e.g., voice receptionist).
Which one does YOUR small business actually need?
Three quick decoders:
If your bleed is customers Googling FAQs at 11 pm → chatbot, probably bundled into your existing support tool.
If your bleed is YOU drafting the same kind of document over and over inside Notion/Gmail/Docs → assistant, often the AI feature already in that tool.
If your bleed is YOU spending hours of admin reading email, updating the CRM, summarizing calls, drafting proposals across multiple systems → agent. This is what Alchmy ships.
The honest answer is most SMB owners need all three eventually, but the agent is the one that materially changes how the business runs.
The five most common agent shapes for a growing team: Inbox Triage, Proposal Drafter, Meeting Notes to CRM, CRM Hygiene Sprint, AI Receptionist. Fixed scope, fixed price, shipped fast. Browse the menu and figure out which one matches your bleed.