Facebook has around 2 billion active users. At its developer conference F8 in April 2016, the company revealed plans to connect even more users and Mark Zuckerberg pointed to a future scenario in which AI-controlled bots provide simple answers in user communications.
Why is this a big announcement? According to many analysts and tech gurus, 2016 will be the year of chatbots. AI-based machines will imitate human speech, answer customer queries, help find products online and solve problems. You can now order a pizza at Domino’s by speaking to Amazon’s Echo or send a text message or emoji on Twitter.
Companies of all sizes now offer some form of customer care: a human responds to emails, on the phone, via SMS, or on social media channels, but thousands of messages are lost or remain unanswered. That can’t happen to a bot. It accepts everything and responds to everything. If it doesn’t know the answer, it can forward the request to a human; 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year. It can answer the same request correctly over and over again without getting tired. Chatbots meet a great need because nobody likes to wait minutes or hours on a telephone queue or for an email.
Technology has the answers here and the big tech companies like Facebook, Microsoft and Google are filling this gap and providing the appropriate basis. After all, the large number of customer inquiries are not about answering questions like „Invent a new type of nuclear fusion“ or „Explain the theory of relativity to me“, but rather about more banal things like returning a product to an online retailer or asking about a technical problem with the telephone provider. The small problems in an e-commerce order can be solved by chatbots, which go through the same process over and over again without becoming rude. They learn and change their behavior in order to support the customer even better in the future.
Of course, the question of machines replacing humans comes up, but if the machine can take over the simple, routine cases, then humans can take care of the more difficult and challenging cases of communication. Humans can take care of the finer details and let bots handle the vast majority of requests.
