Why not just use ChatGPT ourselves?

You often should, and I have said so on calls where it cost me the work.

If your problem is that people write a lot of first drafts, buy the licences, spend a day on training, and keep your money. You do not need me for that.

Where it stops being enough

When it has to know your business. A chat window knows nothing about your stock, your pricing rules, or that this customer always orders on account. Every answer needs a person to supply the context, which means the person is still doing the work.

When it has to happen without anyone remembering. The value in most automation is that it runs whether or not somebody thought about it. A chat window only works when someone opens it.

When it has to write back. Reading and summarising is easy. Updating the order, booking the slot, moving the record — that is where the hours are, and a chat window cannot do it.

When you need to know what it did. If somebody asks in six months why a decision was made, "someone pasted it into a chat" is not an audit trail.

The data question underneath

Someone asked me: if you give all your CRM data to something like OpenAI, what can anybody do about that? That is the right instinct. Consumer chat products and business API tiers have different terms, and the difference matters. Another client mentioned a large bank using a "watered-down version" — what they meant is an enterprise deployment with contractual data terms. That option exists for you too.

My honest test

If a competent person with a chat window could do it in five minutes, do not build anything. If they would have to do it forty times a day, remember the context, and never make a mistake — that is a system.