In a previous blog post I looked at the past and present of chatbots. Let’s take a look now at the (not-too-distant) future of this promising new technology, which has clearly moved beyond the hype stage and entered the realm of reality in the past couple of years.
If your organisation has already invested in chatbots or conversational agents, as they are also called, you may be ready to take that investment to the next stage by building a master Bot. Such master bot is capable of interviewing other conversational agents that are dealing with specific business domains. You can have a specialized HR bot and specialized IT Support bot for instance. The master bot can therefore serve as a single point of contact (SPOC) for your customers or employees enabling them to talk to both specialized bots. When the master bot is enable to understand the user’s question it is capable to redirect to a human if a livechat tool is plugged to it.
Alive Intelligence
If a business domain is well identified and/or if there are only a few business domains with their respective chatbots you need to manage, a master chatbot may not be the thing for you. If, on the other hand, you need to manage the conversation for several business domains, using multiple chatbots, it could quickly become an indispensable instrument to gather in one single channel the user interactions. And it will become a downright mandatory one, should the volume to be handled by a single chatbot exceed a threshold of approximately 1,500-2000 questions.
Does any of this apply to your business? If so, you will be glad to learn that since this month (September 2020), we are launching a master bot solution as part of our Sopra Steria Alive Intelligence offering (SSAI). One of the challenges in implementing such an overarching AI-powered solution, as we realise only too well ourselves, is building an ambitious but realistic roadmap for it. As a rule, we recommend you start with several related but disjointed areas, with the goal of merging them later. It goes without saying, however, that you can count on our experts in this field to guide and assist you in that challenging integration process.
Conversation is key
The launch of a master chatbot solution fits nicely in with our strategic vision for the future of that specific AI technology. Basically, that vision derives from our firm belief that conversation is the key to good business. While more and more companies are starting projects with user interactions based on AI technologies, these projects are very often isolated and siloed from each other. Interactions between bots being necessary to assure continuity in interactions, the master bot will smoothly become a must have for each employee.
That new unique interface, takes the guise of a Personal Digital or Virtual Assistant (PDA/PVA). It will be able to successfully interrogate the right system to obtain any requested information since it is trained to know everything (so to speak) about you as a customer or employee: your vocabulary, your personal interests, your function or role in the company, and so on.
Finally, saving the best for last, our vision allows for each employee or customer to have their own virtual assistant in the future. That sure gives me something to look forward to. I can only hope you too?
Want to find out more about scaling up your chatbots and maximising their potential? Check out this recent article by my colleague Patrick Meyer, Artificial Intelligence Senior Architect & Technical Director.
