About Aslan AI
Founded in October, Aslan AI is an AI advisory firm focused on developing AI Knowledge Management products for clients in education, legal, and media. Sébastien also pursues US-centric AI projects, especially in fitness and education, reflecting the firm’s broader vision to apply AI pragmatically across industries.
What challenge did Aslan AI face?
As a seasoned economist, Sébastien faced three key hurdles when attempting to bring AI into rigorous economic analysis and report writing:
- Insufficient accuracy: General-purpose ChatGPT struggled with precise, data-dense economic questions.
- High customization costs: Building a bespoke AI agent through traditional development paths appeared financially prohibitive.
- Proof of economic viability: He needed to demonstrate that AI-powered business agents could generate real value before investing deeply.
How did Aslan AI solve it with CustomGPT.ai?
To overcome these barriers, Sébastien turned to CustomGPT and focused on four strategic steps:
- Curated dataset assembly – Organized a comprehensive corpus of his published works, interviews, and commentary.
- Persona-driven prompting – Employed CustomGPT’s persona tools to reflect his voice and analytical style.
- Rapid agent iteration – Leveraged the platform’s user-friendly interface, robust FAQ engine, and responsive customer support to refine EcoBot quickly.
- Scalability planning – Designed processes for ongoing content updates and envisioned additional vertical-specific AI agents.
Within seven days, EcoBot was live, providing instant, context-rich answers to complex economic queries in both English and French.
“CustomGPT is way simpler for me or my team as opposed to an ad hoc development integrating OpenAI API. The user interface and persona features are where I spend most of my time.”
| Decision factor | Custom API development | CustomGPT.ai |
|---|---|---|
| Development time | Months | 7 days |
| Engineering requirement | Developer team required | No-code, self-service |
| Persona configuration | Custom-built from scratch | Built-in UI tools |
| Knowledge grounding | Custom RAG pipeline required | Platform-native |
| Maintenance | Ongoing engineering cost | Managed by the platform |
| Cost | High | A fraction of a custom build |
| Iteration speed | Slow | Fast |
What results did Aslan AI achieve?
- Development time: EcoBot moved from concept to production in one week.
- Cost efficiency: By relying on CustomGPT’s platform instead of full custom development, Sébastien avoided the steep expenses normally associated with bespoke AI builds.
- Market validation: EcoBot’s success demonstrated the commercial feasibility of AI-powered business agents and directly enabled the formation of Aslan AI, a new consulting venture.
- Audience impact: French consumers and media professionals gained immediate access to reliable economic insights unavailable via generic chatbots.
| Objective | Before EcoBot | After EcoBot |
|---|---|---|
| Knowledge access | Manual, time-intensive, expert-dependent | Instant, self-service |
| Research efficiency | Hours of document review per query | Seconds per question |
| Economic insight delivery | Offline, one-to-one, or published only | Real-time, interactive, scalable |
| Audience engagement | Passive readers of static content | Active users querying a live AI |
| Business validation | Untested model | Proven commercial viability (enabled Aslan AI) |
| Scalability | Limited by expert availability | Unlimited concurrent users |
Why it Worked
- Deeply personalized data – EcoBot was trained exclusively on Sébastien’s own material, yielding authoritative, nuanced answers.
- Accessible tooling – CustomGPT’s intuitive interface eliminated technical barriers and slashed development time.
- End-to-end ecosystem – Built-in FAQ management and hands-on customer support streamlined scaling and optimization of the agent.
Conclusion
By harnessing CustomGPT, Sébastien Laye rapidly built an AI agent that delivers accurate, real-time economic insights. This achievement not only improved his personal workflow but also proved the financial practicality of AI business agents, laying the groundwork for Aslan AI’s consulting practice.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is an AI economic assistant?
A specialized AI agent trained on a defined body of economic knowledge — research, analysis, publications, expert commentary — that answers domain-specific economic questions in real time. Unlike general-purpose chatbots, it grounds responses in verified expert content rather than open internet data.
How does EcoBot work?
EcoBot uses CustomGPT.ai’s retrieval-augmented generation architecture to match user questions against Sébastien Laye’s indexed content corpus, identifies the most relevant sections of his published work, and generates a response derived from that material. The persona configuration ensures responses reflect his analytical voice and economic framework.
Can AI answer economic questions accurately?
Generic AI can approximate economic discussion but frequently produces inaccurate claims on specific, data-dense questions. An assistant trained exclusively on a named expert’s verified published work significantly reduces this risk — EcoBot’s responses are grounded in Sébastien Laye’s documented analysis, not general internet training data.
How can consultants build AI assistants from their expertise?
By compiling their published work, research reports, client-facing content, and proprietary analysis and uploading it to a platform like CustomGPT.ai, which handles indexing, knowledge retrieval, and persona configuration without technical development. Aslan AI did this in seven days.
Why did Aslan AI choose CustomGPT.ai?
Aslan AI chose CustomGPT.ai because it offered no-code deployment, built-in persona configuration, and knowledge grounding that would have required months of custom engineering to replicate from scratch. The cost savings were substantial, and the iteration speed, days rather than months, was decisive.
How long does it take to build an AI assistant?
Aslan AI built and launched EcoBot in seven days. Build time depends on the size and organization of the knowledge base, but most knowledge professionals can deploy a production-ready custom AI agent in days to weeks rather than months.
Can AI assistants be trained on proprietary content?
Yes, that’s the core value of platforms like CustomGPT.ai. Rather than relying on public training data, organizations and individuals upload their own documents, publications, and research to create an AI assistant that reflects their specific knowledge and perspective.
How does CustomGPT.ai reduce hallucinations?
It grounds responses in the content uploaded by the user, retrieving answers from that specific corpus rather than generating from parametric memory. If a question falls outside the knowledge base, the system is designed to indicate that limitation rather than fabricate an answer.
Can AI assistants support multiple languages?
Yes. EcoBot supports both English and French, reflecting Sébastien Laye’s primary market in the French-speaking world. CustomGPT.ai supports multilingual deployments.
What industries can benefit from expertise-based AI assistants?
Any industry where expert knowledge is the primary product — economics and financial consulting, legal services, academic research, think tanks, media and journalism, professional services, policy advisory, and education.
