Between free but time-consuming internet searching and a paid, full visit to a specialist lies a huge, poorly served space. It’s all those small questions that would only need a short, expert answer, but aren’t worth booking an appointment or paying a full hourly rate for. People usually handle them on their own — spending hours browsing forums or relying on a friend who “knows about this stuff.” Ask Telos, a Polish chat-consultation platform with AI advisors billed by the minute, is aiming precisely at that gap.
The business model is deliberately simple and transparent. There’s no subscription and no commitment. Users buy the virtual currency “Telos” and exchange it for minutes with a chosen expert; by default one minute costs one Telos, and a conversation can be extended with a single click. So you pay only for the actual time of help — a “pay-per-use” approach, familiar from cloud services, brought to everyday advice. For the user it means a low barrier to entry: a short question costs as much as it lasts, not as much as a “minimum charge.”
How Ask Telos Works: AI Advice by the Minute
The strength of this approach is scale. A single platform handles 20 popular specializations at once, around the clock and in four languages, without the availability limits typical of human consultants who sleep, get sick and work fixed hours. That opens the door to rapid expansion: new fields and languages can be added without building advisor teams from scratch in every country. Business applications are a natural next direction too — from customer support, through tools for smaller companies, to partnerships with industries that want to offer their users quick first-line informational help.
Ask Telos deliberately doesn’t position itself as a replacement for a professional. The advisors are artificial intelligence, which the platform discloses openly, and for regulated matters the system refers users to licensed specialists. That gives the company a clearly defined place in the chain: it’s the cheap, instant first step that helps you understand a problem and decide what to do next — available straight from the browser, with no installation or formalities.
— Joanna Busłowicz, CEO of Ask Telos: “We want to be the first place a person turns to with an everyday problem, before they lose an hour in a search engine or pay for a full visit. Artificial intelligence lets us offer that kind of help cheaply, on demand and on honest terms.”
Behind the project stands the Bydgoszcz-based company TELOSAI, which plans to expand its list of specializations and languages, along with integrations that will let advisors draw on up-to-date data and tailor answers even more accurately. If the founders’ forecasts hold, the market for “micro-advice on demand” may turn out to be one of the more interesting everyday applications of AI.
