Is AI Chat Right for Your Organization? 3 Questions to Ask

Need to Know 

• Due to the advent of generative AI, conversational agents have numerous internal and external business uses that aren’t limited to a chatbox.
• AI chat tools can handle repetitive inquiries, provide 24/7 support, and assist with internal tasks by making information more readily accessible.
• For a conversational agent to be the right solution for your organization, you need a large volume of user sessions and existing content or data

In our last article, we explored use cases for AI-enabled chat, also known as conversational agents, for Public Service organizations. We explored how they can help save time and costs while enhancing experiences for their users and internal teams.

Today, we’re diving deeper into the kinds of business challenges AI chat tools can solve, and how organizations can determine whether AI chat is the right solution for them.

Keep reading to learn the three key questions our experts use to determine whether a conversational agent is right for our clients and recommendations for implementing an AI chat tool in your business.

What problems can conversational AI tools solve?

Generative AI is a set of algorithms that can create unique content, including text, images, audio, code, and video. It is the secret sauce that has transformed decades-old chatbot technologies into powerful conversational agents capable of complex exchanges that mimic human conversations.

Conversational agents can engage in small talk, clarify ambiguous requests, and summarize vast amounts of information in plain language. They are useful for organizations that deal with numerous inquiries that follow a similar pattern, for example, from eCommerce customers or city residents. Not only can they help alleviate these repetitive tasks for employees, but they can also be made available 24 hours a day, seven days a week to assist users.

AI chat tools can also be valuable for internal use cases, such as assisting staff with their tasks and making information available that would otherwise be siloed or inaccessible.  

But like any other technology, they have use cases where they can help and harm.

How can organizations determine if an AI chat tool is right for them?

Our experts start by asking these three questions to determine whether a conversational agent is the right fit for our clients:

1. Do you anticipate the need for a large volume of user sessions?

A session is a conversation between a person and an AI agent. Given the cost of implementation, it’s essential that your organization can identify an internal or external need that would require at least hundreds to thousands of sessions to justify the investment.

If you anticipate hundreds of thousands or even millions of sessions, you have a powerful business case for implementing a conversational agent.

2. Do you have a substantial amount of existing content?

Our interactions with conversational agents can create the illusion that the systems are self-training, but like all technology, they require a human to point them in the right direction.

A conversational agent must be trained using digital content and data to respond accurately to customer or user inquiries. If your organization needs to create the training content in addition to teaching it to your conversational agent, it will significantly increase the overall cost of your implementation.

But you may already have more content than you think — agents can be trained using transcripts from a call centre, customer emails, and support tickets.

3. Do you have straightforward challenges an AI chat tool could solve?

When an AI chat tool is being built, adoption is the most important goal. That’s why it’s best to start with simple problems that don’t have many if/then conditions.

Repetitive questions with singular answers, like your company hours or contact information, are a great way to get conversational tools up and running. Once they’ve been adopted, you can introduce more complexity into your chat tool.  

How can organizations begin implementing AI chat solutions?

You might be surprised to learn that creating a conversational agent requires more effort on the design side than on the technology side.

Here's our structured approach to building a conversational agent:

Identify your scope and objectives.

As with any large project, it’s a good idea to start with a project charter that outlines the project's purpose, scope, and stakeholders.

• You’ll need to define your organization’s answers to the questions like:
• What business or user outcomes are you hoping to impact, and how will you measure the results?
• What are the use cases for this agent? What problems should it solve?
• What channels do you want to support? Web, SMS, e-mail, voice?What data and content exists to train the agent?

Design your user journeys.

Once you're ready to create your agent, you'll need to start by identifying the tasks that you expect an end user to attempt, called user stories. Start with journey maps of how a user might go through a simple task, identifying contingencies and offramps you may need to provide for specific inquiries.

Then, you’ll be able to start integrating your AI chat tool into its intended channels, for example, connecting it with your corporate chat service or SMS.

Start training your conversational agent.

During the training phase, you’ll be able to see how your conversational agent responds to the user stories you’ve identified. Based on its performance, you may identify training content that needs to be refined or improved.

A 70% success rate is a good initial target for measuring the tool's performance.

Deploy your conversational agent.

Once your agent is successfully solving user story problems at a high enough rate, you’ll be ready to end the training phase and officially launch your AI chat tool, one channel at a time.

We recommend finding ways to soft launch the agent to a small group, measuring your analytics to see how it’s functioning and continuing to fine-tune with updated content and instructions.

Agents need ongoing care and improvement, so watch your adoptions and success rates carefully to ensure your agent is continuing to function as intended.

Would you like our AI experts to evaluate the potential of a conversational agent for your organization? Contact us to start discussing the endless possibilities.