Do you know that the global chatbot market was projected at USD 190.8 million in 2016 and is set to reach USD 1.25bn by 2025? The other thing that was most surprising was the fact that most of the messenger bots that are used today are not using Artificial Intelligence (AI).

To an end user, it really doesn’t matter if a chatbot is using AI or not to solve their problems. The simple and basic chats on e-Commerce websites can be managed without AI but, however, not complex queries.

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Chatbots that have AI capability have an additional cognitive ability. Which means these can understand users’ response in various forms, it builds an ability to communicate with the knowledge that is accumulated from the questions and the answers given, it can ask clarification questions, it can engage with a user to give an advice, tell a story, share an idea or make a transaction. Additionally, chatbots have the ability to remember a particular topic and interpret pronouns correctly. AI-enabled chatbots can even detect unproductive conversations and abort them, they can self-assess and produce reports, and these are not restricted to pre-defined conversations.

As per a recent study, there are 57% of firms around the globe that have already started using chatbots or intend to within this year. The chatbots that they employ are either customer-facing, transactional or even one that is used internally by employees.

The recent ChatbotConf  in Wien had a number of interesting revelations and one of most interesting facts is that there are many companies that have built big data silos, but are clueless about what can be done with that data (or how can the data from chatbots be leveraged). Most of the experts says that the intent why the chatbots are deployed is not clear. There is an unclear purpose related to deployment of the chatbots or the organization fails to establish clear goals from them.

There are some other firms that establish high expectations from Chatbots like increasing productivity, cutting down costs, being able to generate higher revenue and leads. There is a need to establish goals as per the capability of the chatbots. For example, if you are using conversational AI chatbots, you can expect your customers to experience simplified browsing experience on your website. There can also be reduced costs incurred for customer care services. The impact on the revenue of a company can be seen in terms of reduced expenses for the reduced manpower required to handle enquiries.

Chatbots have 3 stages of maturity. It starts with informational where it uses natural language processing or NLP to map user request to a simple intent. It identifies simple questions and search their content database for the answers. The second one is personalized chatbot wherein the responses are given after searching enterprise systems (for example a CRM) and tries to clarify the user intent with the use of menu or simple questions. You can expect a certain amount of engagement. The third type is AI-based transactional chatbot that emulates human conversation, tries to understand the context and tries to complete a transaction. It can manage complex human intent. It tries to give proactive service with a quick resolution of the issue. AI bots are also getting a voice of their own. Used in many industries, AI chatbots are capable of dealing with real-time interactions and dealing with high-quality customer experience.

There are many companies that will just promise to deliver chatbots in the name of a mere marketing gimmick. Just give us a call to understand how AI-enabled chatbots can help your business get ahead.