Chatbots Will Bring AI Smarts to Your Organization

When it comes to applying artificial intelligence (AI) to the needs of the business world, the latest trends will involve applications that promise to save time, money, and ideally, generate some extra cash too.

Regardless of the type of business, from eCommerce to health care to cybersecurity, any innovation that promises less work and more return on investment will be hard to resist. The latest trends in artificial intelligence and machine learning technology certainly meet those criteria, with conversational AI being one that stands out as promising benefits to a wide variety of businesses.

Updating the Chatbot with AI Technology

Chatbot technology dates back to the 1950s when Eliza, the first chatbot, was created. Engaging with a traditional chatbot can be a rigid experience, where you are limited to the few options you can tap on and potentially some hit-or-miss keywords that could trigger some additional automation.

Adding AI to the traditional Facebook Messenger chatbot, for example, allows for any user input in a specific context to be “understood” by the chatbot, which keeps the conversation going. Applying AI to the chatbot process adds that extra missing touch that allows users to interact in a natural conversation without getting stuck.

Regardless of the application, an “understanding” chatbot means a better customer experience and a faster path to checkout. At GR0W.AI, we use Facebook Messenger as the central platform to create chatbots on, and we add Google’s AI to provide a seamless user experience.

We’re a few months away from adding AI to Instagram DM Automation campaigns as well, which currently allows us to deliver better and faster shopping experiences by designing automated conversational experiences through Instagram DMs.

Given that 81% of people use Instagram to research products and ask questions before buying, leveraging this new tool is the difference between recovering extra sales or, the alternative, losing them to a competition that has already implemented Instagram DM Automation to meet buyers where they are and help them buy.

Instagram DM Automation has only been open to the general public since August 2021, and it will be one of the hottest trends in automation and AI in 2022.

Leveraging AI to Empower Direct Messaging

Applying conversational AI to direct messaging (DM) should be a priority for all businesses in 2022. Companies that are not leveraging this new technology are leaving money on the table.

More than half the world’s population uses Facebook Messenger, Instagram DM, and WhatsApp as their primary means of communication.

Consumers use DMs to reach out to their favorite brands whenever they have questions or concerns and expect to be met with an “immediate” response.

Businesses that are not employing conversational AI to respond to DMs will have trouble growing. Eighty-two percent of consumers rate an “immediate” response as important or very important when they have a sales-related question, and 75% demand immediate service “now” in five minutes from online contact with a brand. It is simply impossible to deliver that kind of support and personalization at scale via human support.

Investing in Ongoing AI Refinement

For conversational AI to be effective, the system needs to provide meaningful interactions that solve one or more problems the visitor has.

In the early days of chatbots, any unanticipated question typed into the chat could (and still can) “break the bot,” thus ending the conversation. This is the type of experience that conversational AI can change, but it requires an evolution in the way most businesses think of AI.

It’s believed that building a chatbot or an AI experience is a one-time job in which you build it and forget it. That is not the case. Providing meaningful interactions with the aid of AI is a full-time, continuous job (and a profitable one as well.)

Imagine you build a website, then you forget about it. You ignore how people are engaging with it, you never optimize your visitors’ experiences, and worse, you don’t drive traffic to it. A website like that will not produce anything.

It’s the same with a conversational framework. You’ll want a strong foundation, you’ll want to build new experiences and improve them continuously, and you’ll want to push as much traffic as possible to it so that you can turn it into a revenue-generating, customer-satisfying, problem-solving machine.

When done correctly, conversational AI streamlines operations by automating 80% or more of all customer support inquiries, empowers marketing by providing new ways to generate leads, and increases sales.

To take advantage of conversational AI, businesses need to invest in their conversational AI departments, as well as train teams to become conversational AI experts, continuously refining the user experience, troubleshooting issues, and building new use cases that add value to the user. Having a dedicated internal or external team to handle the growth of the conversational AI framework is not optional. It’s a must-have.

Using AI to Declutter Our Lives

Jeff Bezos said that he always gets asked, “What’s going to change in the next 10 years?” But he rarely gets asked, “What’s NOT going to change in the next 10 years?

When it comes to Bezos and Amazon, people will always want lower prices and fast delivery. No one will go to him 10 years from now and say, “Jeff, Amazon is great; I just wish the prices were higher and the delivery time was slower.”

The same thing is true in the world of technology. The most sought-after solutions will always be those that save time and money.

As technology advances, we will want to use AI to get rid of repetitive tasks that clutter our lives so we can focus our attention on what matters:

• Spending quality time with our family.
• Designing a business.
• Sitting in a creative state that only we as humans can while AI relieves us of the clutter.

Simply put, the goal is to “do more while doing less.” At GR0W.AI, we aim to give back more time to businesses and help them leverage conversational AI to drive business growth with AI.