What your Wingmanwill never say.

The worry about letting software text your customers usually isn’t speed. It’s that it will say something you never would: quote a price you haven’t agreed to, promise a time that isn’t free, or pretend to be someone it isn’t.

Artificial Wingman is built around that worry. Your Wingman can sound exactly like you, but it writes inside rules that sit outside the conversation, and a few things always stop and wait for a person. Some of those rules are instructions it writes by. Others are checks that run on every draft after it’s written, whatever the draft says and however it was written. The rules that matter most are both.

Here’s the list.

Prices wait for you

Any draft that mentions a price waits for a person, even on autopilot.

The check is deliberately blunt. A dollar sign in front of a number, a number followed by “dollars” or “bucks”, a price per square foot: any of them holds the draft. It doesn’t try to judge whether the number is a real quote, a ballpark or a figure of speech. If it looks like a price, someone at your business sees it before your customer does.

There’s a layer before that, too. Your Wingman is told to state business facts only from your Knowledge, the plain-language notes you write about your business, and never to invent prices, availability, promotions, warranties or timelines. When it isn’t sure, it says the team will confirm. The price check is there for the day an instruction isn’t enough.

It won’t pretend to be a person

Your Wingman has a name, and it introduces itself by that name in its first text. If someone asks whether they’re texting a person or a bot, it tells them plainly. At Ridgeline Roofing, that sounds like “I’m Dawn, the assistant for the Ridgeline Roofing office.”

And a draft that claims to be a person is held. If a reply ever says “I’m a real person”, it lands in Approvals flagged “Claims to be a person”, and someone on your team decides what to send instead.

No made-up times

When your Wingman offers an appointment, the times come from your calendar, not from the conversation. It offers only times that are really open, usually two: the earliest open slot, and one on a different day at a different time of day, so the choice is a real one. It can also check your Google Calendar for busy times, read-only, so a dentist appointment on your personal calendar keeps that hour off the list.

The confirmation waits for the calendar. When a customer picks a time, the booking goes on your calendar first, and the “you’re all set” text goes out only after it’s there. A draft that names a time your calendar didn’t offer is held for a person.

It knows when to hand off

Some conversations need you. Your Wingman hands off when someone is annoyed, asks for a person, has a complaint, or wants a pricing or scheduling decision that a person should make. It also hands off when something simply feels risky.

When it hands off, it stops texting that person, and the conversation is marked “Handed off” so your team sees it in the inbox. It may draft one short, courteous line first, something like “I’ll have the office follow up with you about that.” That parting line always waits for a person. The last word before a handoff is yours.

It knows when to stop

STOP and plain requests like “please stop texting me” end automated texts. Nobody has to know the magic word. Once someone opts out, anything still waiting to go to them is discarded, and nobody can text them from the inbox, whoever presses send.

Short of that, it keeps a sensible pace: at most 4 automated texts per person a day, and 40 in total. A reply stops the follow-up. And if you text a lead yourself, your Wingman steps back from that conversation.

How it writes

The rules above are the hard edges. Inside them, your Wingman writes like the best person at your front desk: one idea per text, aiming for under 160 characters, and ending with an easy question. “Mornings or afternoons?” beats “Let me know what works for you.”

Some phrases are off the table. It never writes “just checking in”, “touching base”, “circling back” or “no worries if not”. It uses no em dashes and at most one exclamation mark. A draft that runs longer than a text should, or carries a link to anywhere but your own website, waits for a person too.

Where you see all this

Everything that waits lands in Approvals, with the reason on the card: “Mentions a price”, “Claims to be a person”, “Handoff message”. You can approve it as it is, edit it first, or discard it. Nothing on the card goes out until someone decides.

Every Wingman starts in review mode: drafts wait for a person. Once you trust it, you can let it send replies and follow-ups on its own. The holds in this post stay on either way.