Skip to main content

Bots can kill User Experience

Bots are all the rage currently. By the looks of it they are at the peak of the hype cycle. We will see their deep fall into the trough of disillusionment soon. After all the well-known examples based on the Facebook messenger are somewhat underwhelming, to formulate it carefully. There is not much artificial intelligence visible - nor needed - to provide services like these. They also come with a poor user interface. And this combination of hyped examples, mixing up chatbots and AI, has the potential to kill customer experience. They certainly kill the user experience.

Unless, this is, that these machines already reached a level of intelligence that they are magic to my simple mind...
Which I doubt.

To be sure, there are AIs around that amaze us: IBM's Watson, Apples Siri, Microsoftā€™s Cortana, Google's Now, ...   even Microsoftā€™s infamous Tay which got a pretty bad reputation in no time, to name but a few. Recently a whole class of graduate students didn't realize that their teaching assistant Jill Watson, an AI based upon IBMs Watson, was actually an AI and not a person.

And I sincerely believe that in not so far future we will see AI in many places that is indistinguishable from a human. As Salesforce's Marc Benioff recently said we will have AI do things that we cannot even imagine right now. The potential is virtually endless (pun intended).

But what we see right now being built standalone or embedded into messaging apps has nothing to do with AI and it often has a poor user interface. This needs to get fixed, or else the potential of falling back to an 90's customer experience becomes very real.

I get the potential benefit of connecting to businesses via one single app. And I do think that it is the right way forward! After all this is the very principle that is behind my Epikonic platform with its app front end.

But the way the Facebook Messenger looks right now benefits exactly Facebook, which doubtless has a fairly elaborate AI behind the scenes.

But enough of the rant. I do not want to be destructive but show a possible way ahead. Because I think that even the simple bots that we see right now have their value, while the end game is in interacting with full-fledged AIs that we perceive as humans, very patient humans. 
According to Wikipedia a chatbot or chatterbot is ā€œa computer program which conducts a conversation via auditory or textual methods. Such programs are often designed to convincingly simulate how a human would behave as a conversational partner, thereby passing the Turing test. Chatterbots are typically used in dialog systems for various practical purposes including customer service or information acquisition. Some chatterbots use sophisticated natural language processing systems, but many simpler systems scan for keywords within the input, then pull a reply with the most matching keywords, or the most similar wording pattern from a database.ā€
This is generic enough that even a simple flower ordering app on the FB Messenger that leads a customer through a predetermined process can get sold as a bot. And this is part of the problem.
In order to make bots useful and therefore accepted we need to work on a few frontiers:
  • An improved definition of what a bot is, in contrast to a simple application that can achieve the same. There is no need for a ā€œbotā€ that allows me to set reminders for myself or get travel tips or a newsletter. There is also no need for bots that fail at basic natural language detection. Scanning for keywords as it is still very common simply doesnā€™t cut the mustard. And the real value lies in a meaningful interaction that successfully imitates an interaction between humans. This definition also needs to involve a distinction between a user interface and the the underlying logic. I would argue that many so called bots are actually just another user interface that is plugged on top of existing applications
  • Standardization; so far it looks like the APIs for every platform are different. I do not think that all APIs will ever look the same but some basic services need to get standardized, also to make it easier for developers to deploy across different platforms.
  • The ā€˜killer botā€™; at the moment we have bots that basically do the same as apps/applications. And then these ā€˜old styleā€™ apps are often richer in functionality and more convenient to use. A useful bot needs to deliver a use that is hard to deliver for a conventional app. Some (rudimentary) candidates that I see are in the area of financial services, like Digit or Penny. But I can imagine many more uses in complex areas like healthcare or day-to-day self organization. Key are rich, useful functionality in combination with a simple user interface and integration to other used applications.

Comments

Last Year's Top 5 Popular Posts

SAP CRM and SAP Jam - News from CRM evolution

During CRM Evolution 2017 I had the chance of talking with Volker Hildebrand and Anthony Leaper from SAP. Volker is SAPā€™s Global Vice President SAP Hybris and Anthony is Senior Vice President and Sales GM - Enterprise Social Software at SAP. Topics that we covered were things CRM and collaboration, how and where SAPā€™s solutions are moving and, of course, the impact that the recent reshuffling in the executive board has. Starting with the latter, there is common agreement, that if at all it is positive as likely to streamline reporting lines and hence decision processes. First things first ā€“ after all I am a CRM guy. Having the distinct impression that the SAP Hybris set of solutions is going a good way I was most interested in learning from Volker about how there is going to be a CRM for S4/HANA. SAPā€™s new generation ERP system is growing at a good clip, and according to the Q1/2017 earnings call, now has 5,800 customers with 400 new customers in the last quarter alone. Many...

Sweet Transformation: Inside SugarCRMā€™s New Direction

Fresh from the 2025 SugarCRM Analyst Summit, waiting for my plane home, it is time to sort my thoughts. From Monday, 1/27 evening to Wednesday 1/29 in the morning we had some time jam packed with information and good conversations with SugarCRM execs, customers, and in between analysts. The main summit started with a bang, namely the announcement that industry icon Bob Stutz joins the SugarCRM board of directors , which is something that few of us, if any, had foreseen. This is exciting news.  With David Roberts , who succeeded Craig Charlton in September 2024, SugarCRM itself has a new CEO with a long time CRM pedigree.  As with every leadership change, this promises some change. Every new CEO evaluates what they see vs. where they want their company to go and then, together with the team, establishes and executes a plan to get there. Usually, this involves some change in the structure of the executive leadership team, too.  This is what happened and happens with SugarCR...

SaaS or the Rise of the Undead

SaaS is dead! It will be replaced by agentic systems that replace coded business logic by AI agents that autonomously interact to bring said business logic to life, just smarter. Satya Nadella said it - or at least something in these lines, if I believe all the pundits around. His words lit up the Internet. And Satya Nadella being the CEO of a 3 trillion dollar company is the ultimate fount of truth and wisdom, when it comes to business applications. Is he not? So, what should we take from his statements? After all, the words of the CEO of one of the top 3 valuable companies on this Earth carry some weight. Let me start straight.  I call BS! SaaS, first of all, is a delivery model of logic that also had some implications on vendorsā€˜ business models and their approaches to pricing. For a variety of good and not so good reasons this delivery model succeeded vs. the prevalent model of on-premises software. Some of the more important reasons have been ā€œno lock in by vendorsā€, ā€œonly pay...

Salesforce stock tanks after earnings report - a snap analysis

The news On May 29, 2024, Salesforce reported its results for the first quarter of the fiscal year 2025. Highlights are a total quarterly revenue of $9.133bn US, resembling a year-over-year growth of 11 percent a current remaining performance obligation of $26.4bn US a remaining performance obligation of $53.9B US an operating margin of 18.7 percent. diluted earnings per share of $1.56 The company reported a revenue guidance of $9.2bn - $9.25bn US for the next quarter and a full year guidance of $37.7bn - $38.0bn US, resembling growth rates of 7 ā€“ 8 percent and 8 ā€“ 9 percent, respectively. With these numbers, Salesforce ended up at the lower end of last quarterā€™s guidance on the revenue growth side while exceeding the earnings per share projection and slightly lowered the guidance for the fiscal year 2025. The result: The companyā€™s share price dropped from $272 to bottom out at $212. The bigger picture Salesforce is the big gorilla in the CRM and CX industry. The company has surpassed ...

ZohoDay 2025 Brings Enterprise Swagger to the Lake

Zoho held its annual ZohoDays outside of Austin in the beautiful Horseshoe Bay resort. While this is a good way away from Austin proper, it also gave the opportunity to have long and good conversations with Zoho execs, customers and fellow analysts outside of the conference and meeting rooms. And guess what, this is exactly what happened.  Big time kudos to Sandy Lo with her amazing team for organizing this and of course also to all the Zoho execs, including the newly minted Chief Scientist Sridhar Vembu, Zohoā€™s new CEO Mani Vembu, Tony Thomas, Raju Vegesna, Vijay Sundaram and many more, who all were more than willing to share information and, even more importantly, get feedback. The latter is not something that we analysts take for granted. Besides the usual ā€“ and important ā€“ state of the business update by Vijay Sundaram, the event revolved around three main topics Ā·       AI Ā·       Enterprise and partner strategy Ā·       Industry str...