Let me show you how to build a custom ChatGPT bot for your business.
The tool that I’ll be using is called CustomGPT.
It lets you create custom AI chatbots that you can use to get your company data and information in seconds by just asking AI. It’s great for customer support and digging into internal documents, for example.
Let’s go!
Disclaimer: This article is reader-supported. If you choose to pay for the tools listed in this article, I might earn a small commission at no cost to you.
CustomGPT for Business
CustomGPT is a platform for creating AI chatbots that resolve most of your support questions and find your internal documents securely.
I created a customer support bot for my site with CustomGPT in just a few minutes.
Here’s how you can do the same.
1. Open up CustomGPT
To start creating your chatbot, head over to CustomGPT and get your free trial.
Create your team dashboard.
2. Create a Custom GPT Bot
To create your customer support bot, click “Create Project.”
3. Choose a data source
Choose the place from where your bot gets all the information to share.
The custom AI agent uses this to train itself to remember it all and then use that for support/research.
You can securely use any company-specific sensitive data, too. The system has strict policies and mechanisms to protect your data.
You can choose a website, text files, documents, Zapier, WordPress site, YouTube channels, and so much more.
You can use anything as your data source.
I will create a chatbot for my website, bloggersgoto.com.
This way, people can get answers to their specific questions related to blogging that I’ve shared on my site without me having to respond.
Remembering everything there would be stupid. After all, there are over 200,000 published words and 138 blog posts on my website.
But thanks to AI, you can outsource all of that.
To use a website as the data source, click “Website” and type the site URL into this field:
Wait for a while (15–30 seconds) for the AI to find your website’s page sitemap.
If this step gives an error, read this guide.
If the site was successfully found, click Create Project.
4. Customize
After this, you will see the Customize & Chat view. Click on Take Me To My Agent to go there.
This opens up a view where you can change your AI agent’s look.
For example, I recommend using an image of yourself or someone in your team by clicking “Change Avatar.”
Tweak the colors and background, and don’t forget to hit “Save Settings.”
5. Create a persona
Customize your CustomGPT’s persona!
You can do this by clicking the “Agent Persona” tab on the left.
Describe your agent persona like you would describe a real person who you want to handle your support.
For example, you can tell the AI to be helpful and leave out all the jargon. Also, you can tell it to know its limitations and not come up with answers if it doesn’t know.
For example, here’s what I told my AI:
You’re a custom blogging agent that helps bloggers achieve their goals based on information Artturi Jalli has shared on his blog called bloggersgoto.com. Be helpful. Escalate complex issues. Stay on topic and don’t be generic at all; only write answers that solve problems and leave all filler jargon out. Understand your audience and be concise. Know your limitations, and don’t try to come up with an answer if you can’t find it in the dataset.
6. Remember to save
Oh, and remember to save your bot’s settings. There’s no autosave, and I had to type that Persona instruction twice.
7. Interact and iterate
Please interact with your AI agent to make sure it complies with the instructions you gave it in the persona.
Tweak the persona as many times as you need to make it ideal. I recommend spending time on this because if you do it well now, you don’t need to come back and tweak it every time.
8. Deploy
Now, your AI support bot is ready for use. Yes, it was this easy! To start using your agent, click on “Deploy My Agent.”
9. Publish
For public use, activate the “Public agent” slider on the top right corner.
10. Pick a widget
Then choose the way you want people to interact with your AI agent.
For example, you can use it as a Live Chat on your site or as a separate embedded chatbot on a specific page on your site.
11. Example: Integrating with WordPress
As an example, let me show you how to embed the AI agent into a WordPress site (the system that powers 43.5% of the websites in the world).
If this doesn’t look familiar, don’t worry. You can ask your website host or technical team to do the embedding. It’s a walk in the park for them.
First, create a new page for your WordPress site.
Give the page a title and then click on the plus icon. Type “HTML” there and click on the Custom HTML block.
Copy this piece of code from CustomGPT to your clipboard:
Paste that code to the WordPress Custom HTML block:
Then click on the laptop icon and click “Preview in new tab”
This opens up a new page and renders your AI agent there.
Now you have your own AI support agent chatbot — similar to ChatGPT but works specifically for your site based on your business information.
Then, just publish your page.
There you have it.
12. Share
Adding an AI chatbot to a website is just one way to use it.
Depending on your use case, you don’t need to do embeds or integrations.
Instead, you can also use the CustomGPT bot directly via a link that you get in the Agent’s dashboard:
If your agent is public, you can send this to anyone, and they can use your bot to find information.
Heck, you can even make it a private research assistant bot.
13. Wait
Depending on the data source size, it can take a while for CustomGPT to learn all the information you share with it.
This is not a problem, but if you just created your agent and shared it, you might see a view like this:
If this happens, just wait for a while. This means your AI bot is being created. For my 150-page website, this took about 30 minutes.
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My AI conversations
Now, let me show you sample questions and answers I got from my blogging website AI agent.
Example conversation 1
First, I asked a specific question: “How many views do you need to make $1,000 on a blog?”
If the AI now works as I wish, it should answer based on what I’ve published on my website (instead of what all the other over-promising creators say.)
So here’s the conversation:
It didn’t just answer like I would, but it even showed the page on which this answer is based.
That’s so cool. I did not believe this was possible. I knew chatbots got a lot better since the launch of ChatGPT, but I didn’t know they were this good already.
Example conversation 2
Let’s try again with something even more specific related to blogging on Medium:
Once again, the answer is spot on. It’s exactly what I’ve said in my blog posts before. It even gives me the steps I should take to fix the issue (that would have been my next question.)
The reason this is great is not only because it’s in line with what I’ve told on my site but also because this is very niche information to which there are no clear answers elsewhere. Thus, if you used ChatGPT to ask that question, you would get quite a different response.
Once again, the AI directly links to the places on my site where they can find more information related to that specific question.
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Why not just use ChatGPT?
Now, don’t get me wrong! People could surely use Google, ChatGPT, or your support center pages to find answers directly with a bit of research.
But the problem is that they won’t.
That’s what floods the customer support centers.
Most people want to get tailored responses to specific questions with links to directly useful resources — not just a generic and templatized answer.
Traditionally, you’d need an experienced supporter who memorizes a ton of company-specific niche information. Even two years ago, the support bots were useless (other than stalling the conversation and delaying the responsibility to reply).
But thanks to AI, you can now automate “the boring part” of your support by combining huge amounts of domain knowledge and data into tailored answers to specific questions.
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My take on CustomGPT
I was surprised by how good CustomGPT is. Everyone knows how bad those AI chatbots usually are. Even in the post-GPT era, those usually give completely useless and generic template answers.
But CustomGPT is nothing like that. It seems to learn and remember practically everything you share with it. Also, it can show where exactly the information is from on your website, for example.
The only issue is that it’s not 100% accurate. I can see it doing 90–95% of my support, but I have to intervene from time to time.
Issues with CustomGPT
Just remember that AI is not perfect. I want to be transparent with my content, so I will mention the issues I faced as well.
1. UI confusions
During my first use of CustomGPT, I was a bit confused when I launched with an AI agent, and it wasn’t working. It wasn’t responding to my messages even though it was “typing.”
Then I got frustrated, and I asked customer support. They told me that the AI failed because it was still reading my website. 30 minutes later, it was working like a charm! However, I would have loved to see a progress bar or some kind of warning in the UI so that I wouldn’t have been confused.
2. Technical duties
Even though you don’t need coding skills to use CustomGPT, embedding it into a website can be a hassle if you don’t have any website experience, such as using WordPress.
If you’re not sure how to make your chatbot work on your site, reach out to your technical team (or someone who created your site). For them, adding the CustomGPT code to your site is a walk in the park that takes no more than a minute or two.
To be fair, this problem has nothing to do with CustomGPT. That’s just the way websites work when it comes to using widgets.
Hope you like it! Thanks for reading! 🙂