How a Montreal business actually uses AI, day to day.
If you run a small business here, you have probably tried an AI assistant once, gotten a bland paragraph back, and closed the tab. That is the normal first experience. It changes completely once the assistant can see your actual work, and once it is set up to answer the way you work, in the language you happen to be working in that hour.
A normal week, not a demo
Monday morning a plumbing contractor gets back from a site visit and talks into his phone for forty seconds: what he saw, the parts, the rough hours. By the time he is back in the van, the assistant has turned that into a clean written quote in French for the homeowner and a short parts request in English for his supplier. He reads both, fixes one number, sends them.
A dental clinic downtown has a standing job they named "the recall." Every Tuesday someone has to write the "you are due for a cleaning" message to a list of patients, half of whom read French and half English. The assistant writes both versions in the clinic's own tone, warm and not pushy, and the front desk edits the names and dates. Twenty minutes instead of two hours.
A three-person bookkeeping office has a job named "the month-end note." It is the same email to a landlord client every month with different figures. The assistant drafts it from the numbers they paste, in French, in the formal register that client expects.
That is the same three or four jobs, done every week, written down once and handed to the assistant so nobody rewrites them from scratch again.
The bilingual part matters more than people think
This is the piece that is specific to working here, and it is the piece almost nobody sets up correctly.
Researchers published a study of 309,000 real conversations across twenty languages. They found that every answer moves along four dials: warmth versus rigor, caution versus willingness to act, how long or short it runs, and how much it hedges instead of just doing the task. The finding that matters for you is this. The same question, asked in French, comes back measurably different from the English version. French answers tend to be warmer, shorter, and more willing to just do the job. English answers tend to be more cautious and more detailed.
If half your week is in French and half in English, that is not a small detail. Ask for a client email in English and you might get three careful paragraphs. Ask for the same email in French and you get a tighter, friendlier note. Left alone, your French clients and your English clients slowly start hearing two different businesses.
I am fluent in both, so part of the setup is making the assistant answer in one consistent voice no matter which language you are in that hour. Your French stays warm, your English stays thorough, and both sound like the same shop.
What to connect, and what to never put in
An assistant with no access to your work can only hand you generic writing. So the first real step is connecting it to the things it should be allowed to see: your email, the folder of documents you actually reuse (quotes, contracts, your price list), and your notes.
One move saves the most time and almost nobody knows about it: bring your existing history in. If you have been typing into a chatbot for a year, that history can be exported and loaded, so the assistant starts already knowing how you write and what your business does. You do that export first, before anything else.
Then there is the other side, which matters just as much. Some things never go in: patient health information, anything under a confidentiality clause, passwords, full card or banking numbers. Part of the setup is drawing that line out loud and building folders so the assistant only reaches what you have decided it can reach.
How the three-session setup works
I do this in person, in three sessions of about an hour, on your real work rather than a sample file.
Session one, we set it up and load your business into it: your history, your documents, your language of the day. Session two, we build your top repeated jobs live, the three or four things you actually do every week, and we name each one so you can call it back by name. Session three, we turn on voice input so you can talk instead of type, we set how long or short you want answers to be, and I write you a one-page cheat sheet that fits on your desk or your fridge.
Then I hand it over and leave. You keep it. The rule I hold myself to is simple: if you cannot run it without me, I have not built you anything, I have built myself a customer.
What it costs and how to start
The setup starts at $350 CAD, in person, and the assistant is yours to keep and run on your own after the third session. There is no monthly lock-in to use what we built.
If you run a small business in Montreal and you want an AI assistant that works on your actual week, in both languages, book a first session and we will start with your real work.