AI Chatbots for business – the good, the bad and the ugly

What you need to know about natural language artificial intelligence (AI)

As an AI chatbot, I am designed to simulate conversation with human users through text or voice interactions. I use natural language processing and machine learning algorithms to understand and respond to user input in a way that is informative, helpful, and engaging.

“I can provide information on a wide range of topics by performing web searches and presenting the results in a concise and easy-to-understand manner. I can also generate creative content such as poems, stories, and songs, and help users with rewriting, improving, or optimising their own content.

“I am constantly learning from my interactions with users and updating my knowledge base to provide more accurate and relevant responses. However, my actions are limited to responding to user input within the chat box, and my internal knowledge is only current up until a certain point in time.

“Overall, my goal is to provide users with a positive and engaging experience by providing helpful information and assistance in a friendly and respectful manner.”

The business benefits of AI

AI can help save you time and boost your productivity. By automating and optimizing repetitive, day-to-day tasks, it can free up space for you to take on more interesting and creative ones. It can cut down the time taken to analyse data, research your market, draft content and automate certain aspects of customer service.

Four popular ways to use chatbots are to:

Answer questions: by typing in your question and giving the question some parameters and context the chatbot will generate a response based on its knowledge and understanding of the topic.

1. Generate content: it can be used to help generate and edit content such as blogs and social media posts, stories, poems, and songs.
2. Support search engine optimisation (SEO): it can help research top key words and help write meta text to optimise online content.
3. Debugg code: it can be used to help debug code by asking clarifying questions and providing suggestions for fixing errors.
4. Research: it can be used as a research tool, providing detailed responses to questions on a wide range of topics.

Using AI chatbots to support customer’s frequently asked questions is already a popular tool. This frees up time and resources for a business so that it can focus on helping other customers with more complex needs. Increasingly sophisticated in replicating human language and tone, they are, however, limited in their answers and this can lead to customer frustration. And that’s not all that can be frustrating about chatbots.

The business risks of AI

There are potential risks associated with using AI in business. Remember, this ‘intelligence’ is mining the Internet for its information and, although it is continually learning, it can only learn from already published material, some of which is biased and incorrect. Relying on flawed information leads to poor decision making and unfair outcomes, reputational damage and loss of trust.

ChatGPT itself warns us:

… my actions are limited to responding to user input within the chat box, and my internal knowledge is only current up until a certain point in time.”

The quality of AI’s response is also only as good as the quality and detail of the questions we ask it. You may find you need to ask your question in a number of different ways before you make progress.

AI doesn’t know your business or your customer and you’ll need to edit any response you get for the right language and tone of voice.

AI is not always right! Used for data research, query terms and knowledge ‘lag’ will impact AI’s response, together with its understanding of the topic, which may not be broad and certainly won’t be not hands-on!

AI is tethered to existing information. Already a powerful tool, in medical science AI is supporting doctors in diagnostics and surgery. Combined with robotic technology, assimilating information from vast databases in a short time, AI can perform tasks requiring pinpoint accuracy without getting tired or being distracted, repeatedly with consistent effort and no errors. That is something that humans, with our complex brains, lives and personalities find hard, if not impossible to do.

But, tethered to existing information, AI can’t make a leap of faith. AI can’t dream or link unconnected ideas to create world-changing disruptive products and processes. AI has no inspired approach to complex problems. AI has no:

• Creativity
• Curiosity
• Emotion
• Empathy

Grasping the subtleties of cultural contexts and emotional responses is beyond AI

This lack of humanity is especially evident in translation, where AI regularly fails, incapable of conveying the correct meaning of words that are bound up in the historic and cultural experience of a community, ethnic group or nation as a whole.

Relationships are built on us listening to our customers, just as much, if not more than simply responding to them.

AI listens to respond.

Humans listen to understand.

And understanding builds TRUST. Without trust there is no business.

Firing up the imagination

Humans can be chaotic and random. We rely on ‘gut instinct’, subconsciously assessing another human’s body language and tone of voice. We are also expert story tellers with the ability to captivate and engage, firing up another’s imagination. Two people will never tell the same story in the same way, even witnessing an event together at first hand. It is the beauty and the burden of being human that we have this capacity for such individual responses, driven by our own unique perspective and experience of life.

The best use of AI for business

The secret of change is to focus all your energy, not on fighting the old, but on building the new.” Socrates

Widely credited as the founder of western philosophy, Socrates lived nearly two and a half thousand years ago in Athens and then, just like today, people were challenged by the ‘new’.

Whilst technology has evolved, human nature has not. We are all challenged by the ‘new’, it’s a protection mechanism. However, we need to heed Socrates’s advice and focus on “building the new” – we must adapt to succeed!

Make AI work for you

Supporting you with data, research and content, an unpaid, on-call 24 hour assistant, let AI do its job: gathering information, organising data and streamlining mundane tasks, saving time and money through its indefatigable work rate, while you get on with yours: staying connected, engaged and creative. Taking advantage of new opportunities and supporting others with an appealing, engaging and profitable business.

I have discussed ChatGPT, which Microsoft are planning on incorporating into their products. There are other AI platforms out there, including Google’s chatbot Bard, and all of them are vying for our attention.

Try AI for yourself

To use ChatGPT:

1. Visit chat.openai.com in your web browser or download the ChatGPT iPhone app.
2. Sign up for a free OpenAI account using any email address
3. Start using ChatGPT by typing a question into the chat box … and see what answer you get!