This is the second of a three-part series on AI in the service industry. Part 1 covered the research. Part 3 is a maturity ladder you can score yourself against.
Where we stand. This post is about our own product. Every Petboost plan includes Grazi, an AI assistant for the business's own team, and the patterns below come from the questions pet businesses asked it over a quarter. We read them anonymised and describe them in words, not counts. No business, client or pet is named, and every example is paraphrased.
Part 1 ended on a gap. Nobody has properly surveyed how groomers, boarders, daycares, walkers and trainers use AI. We cannot fill that gap for the whole industry, but we can see one useful slice of it: what pet businesses actually type when there is an AI sitting inside the system that runs their day.
Grazi faces the business, never the pet owner. So these are the owners' and teams' own questions, asked mid-shift, after close and before opening.
"Where is the setting" comes first, by a distance
The most common question is not glamorous. How do I turn this off. Where do I close a day. How do I merge these two clients. How do I set capacity for the pens.
That is useful to know if you are weighing up AI for your business. The first win is not a robot doing your job. It is not having to hunt through menus, or wait for someone to reply to an email, to find the one switch you need.
A lot of these conversations are a single question and done.
Bookings: recurring visits are the hard part
Changing bookings comes next, and inside that, recurring visits dominate. Ending a series. Pausing one over the holidays. Moving a fortnightly pattern by a day. Adding a sibling to a regular walk.
Recurring work is the backbone of most pet businesses, and it is where the questions get specific. That is also where an answer that can see the actual booking beats a general answer about how software usually works.
The questions about your own business are the ones people love
The uses people seem happiest with are questions about their own business. Paraphrased, they sound like this:
- "What did we take in cash last week? Break it down by day."
- "Which dogs haven't been booked for a groom in eight weeks? I want to ring them."
- "Which of my regulars don't have a card on file?"
- "Do I have any dogs in today that don't get along?"
- "Whose birthdays are coming up next month?"
Some owners have turned these into rituals. One asks for last week's takings every Monday morning. Another asks what add-ons are booked for the day, most mornings, before the doors open. Nobody set those up as reports. People simply started treating the assistant as the person who always knows the numbers.
This is the clearest case for AI that sits inside your records rather than beside them. A general chatbot in another tab cannot see who has no card on file unless you paste your client list into it, which is the one thing you should not do.
Writing in their own voice, mostly after close
The other well-liked use is writing. Service descriptions and About pages, mostly. Expanding a staff member's shorthand into a proper note. Daycares pasting in each dog's day so it reads well on the report card. Clinics turning brief notes into something a colleague can follow.
The timing is the telling part. A large share of the writing happens in the evening, with a visible bump around 9pm. One owner, working through why a service showed no availability, signed off with words to the effect of: it still says no availability, I'm going to bed.
That is the real working day of a pet business owner. The table, the pen and the van run until close. The admin starts after.
Each trade asks differently
Daycare and boarding do their checking early. A noticeable share of their questions arrive between 5am and 9am: who is in today, which vaccinations are due, what add-ons are booked, which pens are free. Overnight-stay pricing and deposits come up often.
Groomers ask most about moving and rebooking, siblings booked together, and writing descriptions for their services.
Walkers ask in the evening, mostly about recurring walks, pick-up windows, service areas and a second dog's price.
Trainers ask about courses and classes: capacity, rolling enrolments and cancellation rules.
Mixed businesses, doing grooming alongside daycare or boarding, ask most about packages, pricing and money.
Weekends are quieter but far from silent, and Sunday is busier than Saturday. Saturday is a working day. Sunday is when the books get done.
Where people still want a person
Grazi hands a conversation to our support team in one tap, and people use that as a normal part of the flow rather than a last resort. The pattern of when they do it is consistent:
- Money questions with real stakes, such as a disputed charge or a deposit that looks wrong.
- Anything that loops. "Still not working" twice is a signal to stop explaining and get a person.
- Answers that run long. The clearest feedback we got was to say less. People asking mid-shift want the answer, then the link to the screen.
One more surprised us. A few owners told Grazi, in their own words, that they would rather ask it than a person because it would not make them feel silly. That is worth sitting with. For some people the assistant is not replacing a human conversation. It is replacing a question they would never have asked.
The phone is where a lot of the day starts
A small but direct set of questions are about the phone. A customer is on the line wanting to enrol, walk me through what to send them. Can our number forward to the business mobile. Can you ring this client for me.
People come to Grazi straight after a call. That matches the research in Part 1: for service businesses, the phone is still where a lot of bookings start, and a missed call often means a booking that went somewhere else.
This month we opened Call Catcher to every Communications Booster business. Calls to your Petboost number ring your phone as normal. When you cannot pick up, the caller hears a short menu: press 1 to get a booking link by text, or press 2 to leave a voicemail that lands in your Messages. There is no AI answering your phone in it, by design. It is the simplest version of an after-hours answering service: make sure a missed call still has somewhere to go.
If you are comparing AI phone answering with a human answering service, our AI receptionist vs answering service guide and what an AI receptionist costs in Australia go through the options, including ones we do not sell. Part 3 covers what we are building for the call nobody can take.
What this taught us
The requests are not "replace me". They are "find me the switch", "tell me the number", "write this better than I can at 9pm", and "let me ask without feeling silly". Almost every one of them needs AI that can see the business's own bookings, clients and takings. Almost none of them needs AI to act on its own.
That is why Grazi drafts and answers but cannot book, cancel, charge or send. You read it, you press the button. We think that is the right rung for most of these jobs, and Part 3 sets out the full ladder.
Want to see where your business sits on it? The free AI readiness assessment takes about ten minutes and asks for no email.
Sources
- Grazi conversations in Petboost over one quarter, read in anonymised form and described in words rather than counts. No business, client or pet is identified, and every example is paraphrased.
- Petboost's product pages for Grazi and Call Catcher, read at the time of writing.