Chatbots have been part of our browsing and interaction habits for several years now. They can even be invasive. We remember their infancy, and the difficulties inherent in a relatively closed model that made them difficult to use. With the boom in artificial intelligence (and conversational AI in particular), chatbots are entering a new era, paving the way for the democratization of data.
When chatbots turn to AI
If chatbots haven't always delivered customer satisfaction, the advent of conversational AIs has opened up a whole new world of possibilities. The great strength of conversational AI is that it gives the illusion of human dialogue, 24/7. The user can now "converse" with the machine, as he or she would naturally, without having to wonder about the right way to formulate a request. Chatbots are based on the same codes as instant messaging, which is deeply rooted in everyday habits.
This innovation has been crucial for chatbots, removing the main obstacle of the complexity of use, or rather, the difficulty of obtaining the long-awaited response. These initial pitfalls are quickly forgotten in the face of the current power of these little dialogue boxes, which are improving customer relations and after-sales service, and continue to flourish on many sites, particularly e-commerce sites.
What does the future hold for chatbots? Their relevance in customer relations no longer needs to be demonstrated, but there are still many areas in which chatbots have a bright future ahead of them, particularly in the popularization of data within business applications.
A lever for the adoption of data by Business Units
Companies have to manage more and more data, whatever their expertise, whether it's customer, market or internal data. However, "data" as such seems very complex and difficult to grasp. The challenge of making this data accessible to as many people as possible, without any technical skills, could be met by chatbots trained in conversational AI and fed with the company's structured data.
Chatbots make it possible to overcome the difficulties of data accessibility, tool management, performance and volume. They are capable of compiling, analyzing and delivering an intelligible, accurate summary to the user.
In other words, for companies, it's a highly effective way of approaching self BI. And more generally, as part of a drive to democratize data, char bots are becoming allies in decision-making: they combine ease of use, speed of restitution and contextualization of information.
Are chatbots the miracle solution for Self BI?
Chatbots may be extremely relevant today, but they are not yet at the end of their story. A number of challenges remain for this ever-evolving technology.
Today's chatbots can find it difficult to handle heterogeneous data sources and certain formats (PowerPoint, PDF or other more exotic formats). This is an obstacle to the mass adoption of chatbots within companies, which, as we all know, use a multitude of different file formats. To overcome this stumbling block, chatbots are currently limited to a specific set of data, which they are able to manage without difficulty, provided the existing data is already structured.
The other point of vigilance concerns data security, since the implementation of conversational AI can raise questions about the confidentiality of the data of the chosen third party (notably Open AI with ChatGPT).
Today, chatbots are paving the way for the democratization of data and data visualization, giving the whole enterprise control over a scope previously guarded by data experts. While the model is still expected to undergo numerous evolutions to make it even more effective in the future, ease of access is improving day by day, thanks to conversational AIs that are interoperable with client environments such as Microsoft Power Platform and Qlik.
Click here to read Pauline Robert's article on the Journal du Net website.
Pauline Robert
Product Owner Data
