Hey everyone 👋 Question for those of you building AI chatbots for clients (or your own product): When you deploy a chatbot on a website, are you actually GDPR-compliant — or are you hoping nobody notices? I’m based in Austria, building AI automation solutions for European SMBs, and the #1 question I get asked isn’t “how smart is your bot?” — it’s: “Where is the data going? Who processes it? Do you have an AVV?” Most US-built chatbots fail this conversation immediately because: • No signed Data Processing Agreement (Art. 28 GDPR requirement) • Subprocessors (OpenAI, Pinecone, Vercel) not disclosed • No Datenschutzerklärung (privacy notice) in the local language • EU AI Act transparency requirements ignored (mandatory from August 2026) Curious — how are you handling this for European clients? Or are you avoiding the European market entirely because it feels too complicated? Happy to share what I’ve built (a 10-point GDPR transparency package) if anyone wants to dig in 🙌

Let's get to know each other! Comment below sharing where you are in the world, a career goal you have, and something you like to do for fun. 😊

Hey everyone here is my introduction (again with more context): 20+ years in performance improvement. 5 months into AI and automation. That combination is why I'm here. My name is Chris Sharkey. I run Sharkitect Digital out of Kansas City. Most people in the AI space sell automations. I don't. I sell an AI Transformation Partnership — built around one mission: helping small businesses understand, trust, and actually implement AI into their operations. Not by handing them tools. By diagnosing their systems and solving at the root. Good doctors don't write prescriptions the second you walk in. They diagnose first. That's the model. Three months ago I started applying this with real clients. First engagement: a construction company that reached out for a completely different project. I sat with them. Ran the diagnosis. Mapped their workflow end to end. What they called for wasn't the real problem. It was a problem — just not the one bleeding them out. Once I showed them what was actually happening, it was clear: they were spending 80–100 hours every week doing nothing but manually moving data from one place to another. By hand. 35 minutes per estimate. Calculation errors costing them real bids. They didn't fully realize how much it was costing them until we put it on paper. So I built the solution around how they already work. No new system to learn. No process overhaul. It adapted to them — not the other way around. Training took less than two hours. Adoption was immediate. 35 minutes → 30 seconds. They're saving $104K–$156K annually in labor alone. That's the original project they called about? Still on the list. Just no longer a priority. Within the first month, they saw the shift. We're now working on two additional projects together — each one targeting a different operational bottleneck. None of it is built in isolation. Every system is designed to stack, integrate, compound, and scale. Each build talks to the last. The business gets smarter with every layer, not just bigger.

After a while you'll reach a point where you might want to go down the agency route. The only issue? I've run into too many businesses that don't want to work with me if I operate an agency. Every single time they've said that, I found it kind of weird because I didn't fully understand the problem. But after doing some digging I figured it out. What seems to happen when a business works with an agency: - The response time from the agency starts to get slower and slower - The person in charge is not the most skilled, but the cheapest person to manage the system - When the system breaks it takes forever to fix it And the agency has multiple clients to juggle, so they can't put all of their attention on one single business. But as a freelancer you could probably handle 5 clients at the same time and make it work. So it raises the question, when should you go from one person to an agency? For me, I'll skip the agency path. I can manage between 3 to 5 clients easily without any extra help. And if I have too many clients, I'd rather raise my prices and have fewer, which is what I've been doing. From my experience, 5 clients at $2k to $5k each is something I can manage. And most businesses rarely need help 24/7. What about you? Does the agency route seem interesting, or would you rather stay a solo freelancer?

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