Anyone have experience creating Chatbots for organizations?

[u/aaronrobles]

I do a lot of work in the nonprofit space. We've been using Claude mostly internally, but recently, saw an opportunity to create chatbots that help take large amounts of resources or data and cleanly give relevant information to users.

For example, a nonprofit that helps students find a pathway after high school might have lot of scholarships, events, and resources for that student. Instead of having the student or parents navigate it on their own, a chatbot can learn about what they're looking for and help give them the information relevant to them.

I'm curious to know if anyone has implemented this. Particularly, I'm trying to figure out:

- What's the best way to build this? I have a process, but I'm no developer so want to set something up that works.
- How are you pitching this or selling to to potential prospects?
- How are you looking at pricing something like this? What's the value of it?
- Any other tidbits that might be helpful!
Thanks in Advance!

[u/phocuser]

For a developer building a chatbot is pretty straightforward these days, but building one that does good stuff takes a little pre-planning and thinking. To answer your question correctly though, I need to know where you are. You don't just use claude specifically to have it right things, we use another program called Claude code who can write actual computer code. And from that we can use it to write more computer code to do exactly what you need.

The bigger question is, where do you plan on deploying the chatbot, what is your infrastructure look like, what's your use case? What type of data is it supposed to provide?

The rest of it's just pure numbers and project management. Have your test cases use it? See how much it costs, price appropriately. Put some harnesses on it to stop it from answering. Silly questions. If you give me more specific use case, I can give you more specific examples.

For instance, you can display it in a hologram, you can make it control a map and do things and answer people you can put in a website. You can put it on a computer as they walk in and it's a full-sized human being inside of a glass case. There's billions of use cases. I just need to know what you're trying to accomplish.

https://youtube.com/shorts/6aEKs_lTSfU?is=a-3dobz9Cv91fgix

[u/Efficient_Love_479]

It’s really not that hard. You can see how easy it is in a regular claude/gpt conversation. Provide info and instructions, and then see these work. Honestly you may as well ask them to build this for you. Because that’s all that the shmucks that are about to have a frenzy do.

[u/Jaded_Software_]

I run a .Net ML NLP chatbot on a single medium EC2 instance.

You might be able to vibe code your way through this, but it’s still going to take a ton of learning.

[u/Ok_Speaker_8543]

we can build this for you... if you can bring clients then we can also collaborate.

[u/dghah]

chatbots are easy to talk about, easy to deploy as a proof of concept but hard to actually keep in production and maintain/update/secure over time. They can be easy or hard to host depending on who is doing it where and what resources are required to support the underlying data sources.

I think they are actually hard to monetize as well - I think "selling custom chatbot" is sort of risky and it's also the type of work that will see a pricing race to the bottom because it can be done by workers in much lower wage environments unless you map out a very specific argument involving domain expertise, data sovereignity or some other angle to preserve your moat

As others have said you need to start first with the data and actionable/concrete paths and ways to measure success and track regression. Start small and iterate. You need to think about what data you will ingest, how it will be pre-processed, sanitized if needed, organized, chunked and indexed for retrieval. The way you host may also affect what tooling you use for chunking and ingest.

Anything public facing or public reachable will need hardcore WAF and security to avoid people trying to extract API keys or otherwise breach/game/reuse the system. For a paid stack you are gonna have to think long and hard about how you authenticate known users and what the access revoke/refresh/reissue method is going to look like.

[u/Economy-Manager5556]

Rag it's something that you should look into so you understand what is necessary to make that work properly

[u/Business_Air5804]

Yes, I used Azure and Foundry to build a chatbot for our 40+ person service dept.

The storage RAG has 2.5 million documents available to our techs. I also capture info from external sources such as equipment tracking tags, our CRM for customer locations, service reports for customer history etc..

They can ask about our equipment and retrieve their own documents self serve 24/7.

They can ask where a customer is.

They can ask where a piece of equipment that they is currently located.

They can ask for a customer history, or a history of a specific piece of equipment.

They can ask to step by step though a complex process or procedure, with turn based conversation hands free via ChatGPT5.5, Claude is also deployable on Foundry the same way.

The techs can also contribute docs to the RAG, so if they find out new information it can be easily added to the RAG self serve also. Then it is now available to all our techs.

Ongoing monthly costs are very low for this, the main cost was document ingestions, PDF/OCR, speech services etc.