How ChatGPT Will Impact the Broader Conversational AI Industry
OpenAI’s ChatGPT, the viral AI-powered chatbot that can write essays, emails, poems and even computer code, is making waves in the news.
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Colin Crowley, CX Advisor for Freshworks, shares his thoughts on what the future of chatbots looks like.
ChatGPT Will Create A Two-Tier System
If ChatGPT becomes more widespread, one wonders how much they will cost – especially considering that current chatbots, with all their faults, are still very pricey for companies – potentially hurting small businesses. ChatGPT could create a stark, two-tier system of chatbots, with wealthy companies adopting ChatGPT and smaller companies stuck with more traditional bots. This is still an issue now, but less so since there are still many common benefits both small and large companies can gain from chatbots, even with current chatbot limitations.
ChatGPT Will Make Leaders Overconfident
ChatGPT’s advanced AI-based logic could make business leaders overconfident in what chatbots can deliver and result in an over-reliance on chatbots. Right now, it is easier to understand where chatbots don’t add value because they aren’t as advanced as the ChatGPT version – but ChatGPT could make the limits of chatbots much less obvious.
To counterbalance this, businesses will likely have to get a lot better at understanding. – which is to say metricising and monetising – the value of the human component in customer interactions. Currently, most businesses only guess at this or define it anecdotally – but more discipline would be needed in putting data behind it and strategically guiding where to inject human beings into engagements. Simply having a human connection, in some cases, may be a branding opportunity for a business or may be tied to higher long-term lifetime customer value or retention.
By far, most people are of the opinion that human connection is irreplaceable. And if this continues to be the sustained truth, it will be a challenging road for chatbots. Further, companies without access to chatbots can utilise this fact to their advantage.
Over Obsession With Chatbots
This type of technology will help get more companies on board with chatbot adoption, where adoption now can be significantly challenged by ambiguities about how to calculate ROI, concerns about poor chatbot experiences, and a lack of institutional knowledge of how to build chatbots, especially where we still live in a menu-based world where chatbots need to be built.
ChatGPT solves many of these issues by clearly being a superior experience, maximising ROI through deflection, and also involving less building (since the chatbot is NLP-powered, so you’re relying on internal learning rather than building complicated decision trees).
Therefore, I feel ChatGPT will help to increase chatbot adoption among sceptics – but again, this has to be taken with the downside of over-obsessing with chatbots.
ChatGPT’s Long-Term Impact On Marketing
The extremely conversational and intelligent nature of chatbots like ChatGPT, especially when combined with data on customers or prospects, could greatly increase the use cases where chatbots autonomously engage prospects and customers for marketing purposes.
You could imagine a world where ChatGPT could manage an entire sales-related conversation with a prospect from start to finish (especially as sales conversations are typically much more pattern-based and regulated than support conversations). Looking at AI more broadly, we will likely see the increased personalisation of everything and more and more diversified channels for delivering that personalisation (like chatbots). This will make companies a lot savvier and more successful in how they position themselves to customers and make it more incumbent on them to tighten how they form their brand.
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