AI
What an AI chatbot can and can’t do for your business
A realistic picture of where a chatbot saves time, where it needs a person, and how the good ones avoid making things up.
The short version
- A chatbot is only as good as the content it is given. It should answer from your documents, not from general knowledge.
- It handles repetitive questions well, and should hand over to a person for anything unusual or sensitive.
- Running costs depend on usage and can be capped.
What it does well
- Answers the questions your team gets every day: opening hours, delivery times, return rules, how-to steps.
- Works at any hour, in the channels customers already use, such as your website and WhatsApp.
- Looks things up when it is connected to your systems: order status, booking times, account details.
- Collects the details before handing over, so your staff start with the full picture.
What it doesn’t do
- It doesn’t know your business unless you tell it. Out of the box, a language model has general knowledge and fills gaps with confident guesses.
- It doesn’t replace judgement. Complaints, exceptions and anything involving money or safety need a person.
- It can’t act on its own. It can check an order or book a slot only if it has been connected to those systems, with limits on what it may do.
- It isn’t free to run. Each conversation has a small cost, which adds up with volume.
How the good ones are built
The technique is called retrieval. Before answering, the system finds the relevant passages in your own documents and hands them to the model, with an instruction to answer only from those. This keeps answers accurate and lets the bot show where an answer came from. When nothing relevant is found, it says so and offers a person instead of guessing.
- Your content is the source: policies, help articles, product details.
- Clear boundaries: what it may answer, and what it must hand over.
- A hand-over that works: the conversation so far goes to your team.
- Measurement: which questions it answered, which it couldn’t, and what that cost.
Is it worth it for you?
It usually is when your team answers the same twenty questions again and again, when customers write outside working hours, or when replies take long enough to lose sales. It usually isn’t when you get few enquiries, when every one is different, or when your information changes faster than anyone updates the documents.
A sensible first step
Start with one channel and one job, for example order and delivery questions on WhatsApp. Run it alongside your team for a few weeks, read the questions it couldn’t answer and improve the content. Expand once it has earned trust.