No, your product doesn't need an AI chatbot

This week, at Vivatech Paris — one of Europe’s biggest technology conferences — company after company announced the integration of AI chatbots into their products, but is this what customers really want or need, or is tech leadership just jumping on another bandwagon?

It was just about 2pm, and neither the post-lunch dip, nor the half-empty conference hall could deter a smiling, over-enthusiastic moderator from introducing her panel on how AI is going to revolutionise travel. Seated on stage were representatives from two of Europe’s biggest travel and tourism companies. The moderator turned to the audience and asked: “How many of you used a chatbot to book your travel here?”. In a crowd of over one-hundred people, a meagre five raised their hands. Undeterred, the moderator continued with the script: “Wow! So a lot of you!”. Never have the present delusions of the tech industry been better encapsulated than in this exact moment.

Almost every panel I attended that day had an announcement of the integration of AI chatbots into products millions of us use on a regular basis, but none of these announcements came with any actual indication of how this would improve user experience. Hundreds of companies are proactively taking decisions that make their products worse all to stay on the hype train. But the truth is, no: your product doesn’t need an AI chatbot, and this is why.

A chatbot isn’t an alternative for a well designed, well structured product

One of the common uses I’ve seen for chatbots is to try to take unstructured, messy information and make it more accessible. Complex support knowledge-bases, with numerous interlinked pages are a classic example of this.

Chatbots can make this sort of site easier to navigate, but far too often, they misunderstand the query of the user, hallucinate answers, or simply fail to find the information in the knowledge-base relevant to the user. Using chatbots to solve this is treating the symptom, not the illness: your information is poorly structured, making it difficult for users to find the information they need. Fix that and users will have a better experience finding what they need, no chatbot required.

A chatbot makes it hard for users to discover features

A second problem with chatbots is that it makes it hard for users to discover features: take a travel website: you enter your origin, destination and dates, then you’re provided with results, a sidebar then indicates how you can filter these results: it’s right there, inviting the user to discover the features of your service.

With a chatbot, at best, the user has to guess if the feature they want is available. At worse, the feature is something they didn’t think they needed, and they will never discover it because they hadn’t even considered it. To make matters worse, they then have to try to phrase their request in a way that the chatbot will understand - something that isn’t always easy.

Good user experience relies on users being able to intuitively discover features of your product, and get what they need with minimal cognitive load. Chatbots fail to provide any of that. Even if you provide a couple of example prompts, users still don’t know what your product is capable of. Which leads me to the next problem.

A chatbot is often slower than a traditional UI

The lack of discoverability, and the need for your users to prepare a prompt to make your product do what they want it to, lead to higher cognitive load, and an experience that is often slower than just using tried and tested traditional UI.

What takes longer: Writing “Paris to Brussels train on 2 april after 10am via Lille” or simply selecting those options in the UI, which already has autocomplete and a calendar widget to speed the process along?

We already know the answer: typing out your request takes longer, and that situation is exasperated when typing on a phone keyboard.

Chatbots still hallucinate and make mistakes

In addition to slowness, hallucinations and mistakes are still a massive issue, even in commercial chatbots. Take my (unnamed) mobile operator: they recently removed their structured support page in favour of a chatbot which then redirects you to the page you need. I needed to transfer a sim card to another account, after having searched for this, it gave me a set of instructions to transfer my eSim to another phone. Had I followed the first three instructions without reading the rest, I would have disconnected my own phone from the mobile network with no easy way to reconnect.

I ended up googling the operator name and a selection of keywords to find the old page which explained how to do what I needed to do, because the chatbot simply wasn’t providing the correct answer, which brings me to another point.

Chatbots annoy your customers

Your customers have a workflow: they are used to using your product, know their way around it, and know what they want when they go to use your product. When you’re trying to use a travel search engine and suddenly a chatbot window pops up obscuring the UI they are familiar with and getting in the way of their workflow, all to provide an inferior experience, you’re not helping your customers: you are pissing them off.

Chatbots are expensive to operate, and could get even more expensive

In addition to all of these problems, there is a cherry on the cake: Chatbots are going to cost you money, for little actual gain in user experience, and their price could rise in the future. If you’ve done like many companies and built your chatbot on OpenAI’s API, you are very likely to face cost spikes in the future: OpenAI is still not profitable, and they are losing money on every request you make to them. Eventually they will either increase their prices or go out of business.

Conclusion

The whole industry has jumped on a suicidally dumb bandwagon, replacing or degrading their existing products with AI chatbots that don’t provide a good experience to their users, while costing companies more money. Well thought out AI solutions, built with customer experience in mind, can be a massive opportunity for your company, but that simply isn’t what chatbots are. It’s time to get off the hype train.

Photo by Mohamed Nohassi on Unsplash