How to sell AI employee setups to small businesses: the integrator model

You delivered the pipeline. Stages are set, fields are required, the sales team is trained, the invoice is paid. A month later the client calls, and the question is not about the pipeline. It is about who answers WhatsApp at eleven at night, when the lead from the ad arrives and the salesperson has gone home.

The client asks the integrator because there is nobody else to ask. It is also the easiest sale you have: they already pay you, already trust you, and the thing they are asking for already sits in their head next to the CRM setup you did. The only thing missing is a line on your price list.

Below: what a setup of an AI employee consists of, what people charge for, where the recurring income comes from, and how to hand the client a finished project so that they own it and you are not left holding their passwords. Disclosure: we build CRAIM, and the transfer mechanics and the partner programme described here are its. The setup itself is the same work for any AI employee, wherever it lives.

Why this work lands on the integrator

The platform vendor has a product and documentation. The client has a folder of materials and an idea of what they want. Between the two sits work neither of them will do: turning price lists, an old website and the owner's notes into knowledge an AI can answer from without inventing anything, and writing the instruction that keeps it inside the lines.

That is exactly the work you already do when you set up a CRM, on a different subject. You already know how to get pipeline stages out of a client who did not have them in their head. Getting the rules for answering customers out of them is the same job.

Three things make it easier than a CRM setup. The client sees the result in minutes, not a quarter: the employee answers its first message while they watch. Nothing is programmed: the role, the instruction and the rules are written in plain language. And a mistake is visible immediately, because in copilot mode every message to a client waits for a person.

What a setup consists of: the checklist

The list follows what gets created in the project, in the order it makes sense to do it.

1. Reading the materials. The website, price lists, files, a link to a Google Sheet. CRAIM reads them in one pass and proposes what goes into the company's AI profile: four main sections (about the company, clients, sales rules, communication style) and lists of separate entries (sales scenarios, what never to promise, objections, case studies, promotions with their dates). It also lists questions it could not answer from the materials. Nothing lands without a person approving it in the review window. The client hands over half of it on day one; the other half you pull out with those questions.
2. The catalogue. If the client sells products or services with prices, they go into a table with search and filters, from the materials or a CSV. That is what the employee reads when a customer asks whether there is anything cheaper. Update the table and the answers update, with no change to the instruction. An item without a price is "on request", and the employee never names a price the table does not hold.
3. The instruction. The role, what it handles, what it never promises, when it calls a person. CRAIM can draft it from the profile and the rules, and checks a saved instruction for things it asks for that no rule actually does. It is still the most expensive hour of the whole job and the most underrated: the client thinks it is configuring a bot, and it is writing the sales department's rulebook, which they did not have before you.
4. Channels. WhatsApp, Telegram, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, Avito, Max, Gmail, a chat on the client's website, and a phone line for outbound calls. Who answers is set on the pipeline: each pipeline names the AI employee that leads its clients, or "people only", and each channel has one switch for whether AI answers in it.
5. The rules. When something happens, what to do: a customer writes, a customer goes quiet for two days, a deal enters a stage, a payment is due. The step is a piece of work (write to the client, call, prepare an offer, hand over to a person, move the deal), not a tool call. The instruction governs how the employee acts within its turn; the rules govern when the turn comes.
6. Autonomy. Three modes per employee. Manual: it acts only when a person asks. Copilot, the default: every message to a client waits for a person to send it. Autopilot: it sends on its own. Autopilot goes on when the drafts stop surprising anyone.
7. Two weeks of reading drafts. This is part of the setup, not support: two weeks show what the knowledge is missing. Corrections people make to drafts come back as proposed lessons, one fact fixed everywhere it is written, so the knowledge improves against real conversations.
8. Migration from the previous CRM, if there is one. From amoCRM, Kommo, Bitrix24 and HubSpot the import moves contacts, companies, deals with their pipelines and stages, tasks, notes, files and calls, plus SMS from amoCRM. Messenger chats do not move from any of them; WhatsApp history comes in separately, from the phone's chat export. The migration is done into the project before the handover, not after.

What to charge, and how the money adds up

You set the setup price. The platform is not part of it and takes nothing from it, so the benchmark is your own price list for CRM setups. In volume of work, an AI employee setup is comparable to a mid-complexity pipeline; in how much the client notices the result, it is well above, and that belongs in the price.

Three lines of income make up one model. The middle row is CRAIM's partner programme; the other two are yours.

The partner share is easy to compute exactly, because the plans are public. A client who pays for Team during the trial keeps $29 a month for the first year, then pays $49. You get $14.50 a month in the first year, $174 for it, and $9.80 a month after that for as long as the client pays. Business is $59 in the first year and $99 after: $29.50 a month, then $19.80. A client who spends $50 a month on AI adds $10 a month on top. None of that replaces the setup fee, but ten clients on Team bring about $1,740 in the first year from the subscription alone, which nobody invoiced.

How the programme works, in short. The terms are the full version.

• There are two programmes. Recommendation is open to anyone with a CRAIM account, without an application: 20% of the client's subscription payments during their first 12 paid months. The partner programme is open to anyone who brings businesses, integrator or not, by application, which CRAIM reviews: the 50%, 20% and 20% above.
• A client who signs up through your link gets a 30-day trial instead of 14. You may give them 10% or 20% off the subscription for 12 months; it comes out of your first-year share, so with 20% off you get 30% instead of 50%. You choose the discount on each link.
• A client is yours if they signed up through your link, or followed it and signed up within 90 days. As an approved partner you also get a client you handed a project to, if nobody else brought them first.
• Each share becomes yours 30 days after the payment, so refunds come first. You can move it to the AI balance of your own workspace at once, or withdraw it in cash from $50, by bank transfer or in cryptocurrency, if you are a sole proprietor, self-employed or a company, in any country.

How to hand over the project without keeping the client's passwords

An integrator usually has two bad options. The first is to create the account under the client's email and work in it. Then the password is shared, the action history is mixed, and the client cannot tell who pressed what. The second is to build everything in your own account and then redo the setup in the client's. Then the work is done twice.

In CRAIM a project moves from one workspace to another the way a domain does. You build it in your workspace, next to your other clients' projects. When it is ready, on your workspace home you press Transfer to a client and enter their email. The client gets the offer by email; it lives seven days. Until the client accepts, you are the owner and the payer, and the project keeps working.

The client signs in with that email and accepts the project. They pick which of their workspaces it lands in, or a new one, and what you stay in the project: integrator (you keep setting it up but do not see their revenue or deal amounts), administrator, manager, or nobody. That role covers this one project, with no access to their billing or their other projects.

From that second the project is theirs. What happens at that moment is worth knowing in advance, because the client will ask. The full sequence is on the project transfer page in the knowledge base.

• The client becomes the owner. Every previous member of the project is suspended, and pending invitations are revoked; you come back in the role the client chose.
• Every active session in the project is signed out. The password you used during the setup no longer works there.
• Your billing period for the project closes and the client's opens, stamped with the same second. AI usage is charged to their balance from then on.
• The project is not copied. Employees, knowledge, catalogue, channels, rules, deals, conversations and history stay where they are and change owner.

Two checks can stop a transfer, and it is better to pass them beforehand. First, the client's plan has to fit the project's active AI employees: one on Start, five on Growth, fifty on Team, a hundred on Business. A project with two employees accepted onto Start is refused, with the reason stated. Second, while a call, an AI task or a message delivery is running in the project, the transfer waits for it to finish.

What it costs you

While the project is yours it counts against your plan, specifically against its limit on active AI employees. Start, at $9 a month, holds one active employee. Growth, at $29, holds up to five across every project in the workspace. Team, at $49, up to fifty. Hand a project over and its employees free up a place for the next client.

Your workspace is free for the first 14 days at the Business level, with a $5 credit for AI usage. The trial is granted once per email address, ever, and opening workspaces under different addresses to get around that is pointless, because the project leaves for the client's plan anyway.

Who this is not for

A client with no materials. If the company has no price list, no description of its services, not even a message history that shows how it answers, the employee has nothing to answer from. Materials first, then the setup, and that is a separate piece of work worth selling too.

A business with five enquiries a week in one channel. The employee will pay for itself, but the client will not feel the difference, and you will be left supporting a cheap project expensively.

An integrator who wants white-label. The client sees CRAIM and knows where their project lives. There is no reselling of the subscription through the integrator: the client pays for their own plan, you get your setup price and the partner share.

The order for the first project

1. Register your workspace and apply to the partner programme in Settings → Referrals. The first two weeks are free, which is enough for a whole first project.
2. Send the client your link and ask them to sign up through it, under the email they will actually use. They get 30 days instead of 14 and only see the project when it is transferred.
3. Create the client's project in your workspace. Load the materials, approve the AI profile and the catalogue, write the instruction and the rules.
4. If the client is leaving amoCRM, Kommo, Bitrix24 or HubSpot, migrate the history now, while the project is yours.
5. Connect the client's channels and start the employee in copilot mode. Read the drafts with the client for two weeks.
6. Press Transfer to a client and enter their email. Agree beforehand which role you keep and what the support covers.
7. After acceptance, check that you see the project in the agreed role and that billing has moved to the client.

The short version

Setting up an AI employee is the same work as setting up a CRM: getting the rules out of the client and turning them into a system. It sells to the same people, the same way, at your own price. On top of it sit CRAIM's partner share, 50% of the client's subscription in the first year, 20% after it and 20% of their AI spend, and a monthly support fee. The project is built in your workspace and handed to the client with one button, which they press themselves. The calculator, the prices and the usual questions are on the integrators page.