AI-Powered Bots for Businesses: What Is the Value?

If you search for AI-powered bots for your business, you will find that there are a lot of options. Some of them are good for internal tasks, such as generating ideas and copy. You can train other ones to use your knowledge base and quickly and efficiently work with customer queries. Some bots even combine AI chat capabilities with escalation to human support agents. 

There are multiple bot building services, including, for example, HubSpot, Kommunicate, and SmythOS. Bots are as accessible to businesses as ever! But why should a business use them? Let’s discuss.

What Are AI-Powered Bots?

AI-powered bots are not your regular chatbots, which only have a few predetermined scripts. AI bots use techniques like Natural Language Processing (NLP) and Machine Learning (ML) to “understand” what humans want from it.

NLP involves literally processing (with the help of special computational techniques) regular human language. ML means training AI on huge amounts of data to identify patterns. 

AI-powered bots, as a result, can produce answers to human queries. They are a tool, which can improve your interaction with your clients, as well as solve other tasks for you as a business owner.

What Are the Benefits and Uses of AI-Powered Bots?

You are probably already coming up with ways to use a bot which can, in a way, understand humans. Let us consider a couple of those.

Client Engagement

Supporting clients throughout their journey with your product or service is usually time-consuming. You often need support teams to take care of customer questions and requests, but not all of those require human interaction. In fact, AI-powered bots can answer many questions automatically.

Do you have a FAQ? Automate its responses through an AI bot. It can be available 24/7, and it will decrease the workload for the support team. Note also that AI bots often can respond to multiple people at once while delegating the more complex questions to your employees. This job is a perfect fit for an AI bot, especially if it can memorize your knowledge base (like, for example, Lyro).

Don’t forget to have your AI bot tell customers about events, discounts and possible purchases. If it is advanced enough, it can even make personalized offers to customers. And, of course, it can easily collect data about clients and their purchasing patterns. Use that AI to the max and save money on customer support!

Efficiency

AI can help with a lot of activities, although not every AI bot is able to do it all. Still, here are a few options.

• Ideas! Tools like ChatGPT are great at generating ideas! So use them when you need to make something new. 
• Emails and email templates, as well as other copy. AI can make new texts, but you can also request that the bot improves what you already use.
• AI can take over the task of sending emails. Did your client abandon a shopping cart without making the purchase? AI bot will remind them about it. 
• AI can automate scheduling, saving you time and effort. Apart from client interactions, that might include working with potential employees. AI bots do not have to only interact with clients. 
• Collect feedback with the help of AI, while also having it provide some insights and analysis.

Depending on your budget and needs, an AI can be extremely helpful. Use it wisely and watch efficiency skyrocket. 

Some people call this artificial intelligence, but the reality is this technology will enhance us. So instead of artificial intelligence, I think we’ll augment our intelligence.

Ginni Rometty, former chairman, president and CEO of IBM

What Are the Limitations of the Bots?

Of course, bots have their limits. Some of those limits can be offset by using more advanced technologies or multiple models at once. For example, Perplexity reports using GPT-4 Omni, Claude 3.5, Sonar Large and Grok-2. But still, AI bots are far from ideal, and here are some of their limitations.

• Bots are not always accurate. We all know that ChatGPT just makes up sources that do not exist. That is why a human is needed to work with AI-powered bots just in case something goes wrong. That said, a model with access to your knowledge base would probably have no issues retrieving the information your clients need.
• Bots may require skilled labor. A lot of bot builders are purposefully made to be easy. Simple drag-and-drop is a common tactic. However, those bots have limited use. If you want an AI bot made specifically for you, coding is a necessity. 
• Most bots require investments. There are free versions in some of the AI-powered bots. But most require payments: from insignificant to rather substantial. However, the benefits of such a bot are likely to be worth quite a certain amount. What amount? Depends on you.
• Bots are limited in their conversation abilities. It depends on the bot, but sometimes they struggle with understanding unclear requests that a human would figure out. A lot of bots are also bad at emotions. Their responses may be stilted and clearly AI-generated rather than smooth and human-like. They tend to “forget” what happened in the conversation some time ago. The more advanced a bot is, the less of a problem conversational AI limitations become.

Solutions

You can work with the limitations. For example, you might choose a cheaper bot if you do not need certain features and select a suitable price. Or you can splurge a little and purchase or create a more expensive bot that is also more human-like in its responses. You just need to know what you want from an AI bot and then find one that fits your expectations. 

In Conclusion

AI-powered bots are a relatively new tool, but they already show great potential. The easiest way to apply it is through client support, but AI can do so much more! And there are limits to what it can do, but with how quickly AI is developing, we can expect only more from it. Choose your AI, train it to work for you, and you will reap the benefits of modern technology.