Most chat bots without AI will eventually fail

In a previous article I wrote about why SMEs are adopting (conversational) Artificial Intelligence (AI) and explained how a solution including AI for SMEs would look like. In addition, I highlighted that from a user experience point of view, i.e. to have a more human conversation with a bot, an AI powered bot wins hands down. AI can assist with small talk, and can extract multiple variables from a single message, whereas without AI you can only pick up one variable per message and will end up forcing your visitor to navigate similar to a website.

Another reason to add AI to a bot is however to make it easier to maintain a bot and hence save costs. With a chat bot only solution, you’ll have to define everything you can imagine that a visitor can tell the bot as well as the corresponding response. For example, when you have a bot to help a visitor find a nearby public toilet, the visitor could refer to the toilet as ‘wc’, ‘the Gents’, ‘the Ladies’, ‘loo’, ‘lavatory’, ‘bathroom’, ‘restroom’, etc. Instead of catering for all the different values, with AI you would just create synonyms for toilet and regardless of which word the visitor actually uses, AI will recognize it as ‘toilet’ and will pass on the correct value.?

With AI, you don’t need to write so much logic as without. I mentioned that AI can extract multiple values from a single message, whereas a bot without AI can only pick a single value per message. Hence, without AI, you would need to write 5 separate pieces of logic (flows) to pick up 5 values. This will not only cost more time but will also lead to unnecessary errors.?

Adding new business logic to a bot without AI also forms a major challenge as the flows are many and interrelated in a complex way. You could think of a bot that initially was meant to service a local market and now needs to keep up with the international expansion of a company.?

In other words, as the functionality of a chat bot grows, the complexity will increase exponentially and will eventually lead to the collapse of the entire system. Powered by AI, the complexity will increase proportionally and the whole solution becomes future proof. The additional ‘hurdle’ in terms of knowledge and a little bit in cost of adding AI, will quickly start to pay off.

My conclusion, if you want your bot to handle a little bit more than FAQ (Frequently Asked Questions) you MUST power it with AI.