What to Include in an AI Tool Review After Six Months

Gathering the Right Evidence Before the Review Meeting

A six-month review is only as useful as the evidence brought into it. Rather than relying on a general impression of "it seems to be working fine", it helps to pull together specific records in the weeks before the review:

• A sample of transcripts from each month, ideally the same handful of enquiry types each time, so you are comparing like with like.
• A rough count of how many enquiries needed a human to step in versus how many the tool handled without escalation.
• Any customer complaints or confusion that can be traced back to something the tool said or failed to say.
• A note of any new products, services or policy changes introduced during the six months, and whether the tool's knowledge base was updated to reflect them.

Without this kind of record, a review tends to become a subjective conversation about whether the tool "feels" helpful, which is much less useful than checking against what actually happened in the conversations themselves.

A Worked Example of a Six-Month Review Outcome

Take a small plumbing business that introduced an AI tool to handle initial enquiries. At the six-month mark, the transcripts show that the tool consistently handles questions about call-out charges and service areas correctly, but repeatedly struggles with enquiries about boiler brands it has not been told the business services. Customers asking about a specific brand get a vague non-answer instead of a clear "we don't currently service that brand, but we can still take a look at the wider issue".

This is a useful, specific finding rather than a vague sense that "the tool needs improving". The fix is narrow: add the list of serviced and non-serviced boiler brands to the knowledge base, and test the same question again a week later to confirm the gap has closed. Reviews that produce this kind of concrete, testable action item tend to lead to real improvement, whereas reviews that conclude with general statements rarely change anything in practice.

Deciding Whether to Continue, Adjust or Replace

Not every six-month review ends with "keep going as before". Sometimes the honest conclusion is that the tool was configured for the wrong scope from the start, and rather than a small tweak, it needs a more significant rework of which enquiries it handles. Other times the review shows the tool is working well but the business has simply outgrown its original setup, for example by adding a second location that needs separate handling.

Whatever the outcome, the decision should be driven by the evidence gathered rather than a gut feeling about whether the six months "felt" successful. A tool that quietly handles eighty percent of routine enquiries correctly, with a clear plan to fix the remaining gaps, is usually a better outcome than starting over with a different provider on the assumption that a new tool will avoid all of the same teething problems.