The Rise of the Chatbots
By Alex Dundas
Chatbots have popped up in many corners of our lives recently, but their roots go back a long way. And their future may change the way you do business.
Chatbots were really not very common until OpenAI came along and released ChatGPT two years ago. That garnered a lot of publicity and opened a door for people to experience - and experiment with - chatbots.
BlueSkyAI COO Joseph Rhodes says: “I think of this as a long tail evolution, because before there were chatbots there was Google, and before Google there were search engines. I think that the chatbot is the natural next step: we have already been trained to ask Google questions, to talk to Google as if it is going to help us, and that’s a transferable skill for using a chatbot.”
But the chatbot is more than just a search engine. It actually uses a form of intelligence to try to find you the best answers or to summate answers based on what it knows in its database. Much like you would ask a friend: Hey, I'm into this kind of music, what do you recommend?
Chatbots allow you to get more concise answers and richer answers than from a search engine. Joseph says: “I think today we’re right on the cusp of chatbots transitioning from being a novelty, to being something we incorporate into our everyday lives and even rely on to some extent. Which, I think, is a good thing.”
There are growing pains with every new technology, and that’s been true with chatbots. You could say we’re at the “cautionary tale” stage of their evolution, where they’ve been around long enough to make some mistakes.
Take what happened with Air Canada earlier this year: a chatbot told a customer he could purchase a full-price ticket, then get a bereavement discount retroactively. Except that when he tried to do just that he was told he should have applied for the discount before purchasing the ticket. Air Canada denied him the discount and the customer sued.
Air Canada’s defense was that the chatbot was a separate legal entity responsible for its own decisions, an argument the court rejected. Instead, the court said that Air Canada was in fact responsible for the information its chatbot disseminated.
This kind of ruling may put some shackles on chatbots for a while - e.g., “I can’t answer that but let me transfer you to someone who can” - but in the long run hiccups can be good for business. They help refine the tech and drive progress, because chatbots are here to stay and both businesses and consumers will benefit from improved applications.
The underlying tech is already moving beyond the inquiry-and-response realm. Chatbot-derived applications like virtual assistants are increasing in popularity. Here at BlueSkyAI, virtual assistants are, not surprisingly, part of our daily workflow. Joseph says: “I find my virtual assistant to be a huge help and a timesaver. I use it daily. It automatically puts things on my calendar, schedules calls with clients, and keeps my day in order.
“It also helps me create any documents I may need. It can provide me with a template or a framework that’s basically a launchpad. And when I get further along on something, I can ask the assistant for its opinion, effectively putting another set of eyes on deliverables I create.”
We have a scheduling tool we use when we’re delivering software, which is linked to our ticketing system. As we create tickets for our engineers to work on, it connects with the scheduling tool. The AI in the tool understands the time requirements of the ticket and the importance of the task, and carves out blocks of time for the engineers to work without a lot of context switching. It not only helps boost productivity but also makes the day more enjoyable for the engineering team, since they can focus on what they’re doing.
Tools like this are huge value-adds for startups and small- to midsized companies, not just in the efficiencies they create, but in a quality-of-life sense. They can free up bandwidth to let creators create, innovators innovate, and entrepreneurs work to make their dreams a reality.
At BlueSkyAI we don’t believe that chatbots or AI are going to take jobs away. Yes, they’ll change the way we work and maybe even change, to some degree, the jobs we do. But these are opportunities, not headwinds.
As Joseph says: “That’s one reason why I’m excited to be part of BlueSkyAI. We are an AI-first company, but we are AI with a human touch. We never lose sight of the people at the end of the process, whether they’re clients or end users. We’re always trying to leverage tech- including chatbots - to make someone’s life better.”
