2019 Chatbot Predictions

There is a lot of excitement around the category of Conversational Computing, which is the ability of software to engage in natural conversations with people, understand their intent, and take action to fulfill their requests.

The opportunity for Conversational Computing to create business value is tremendous. Automation of parts of the customer experience can result in significant cost savings, in addition to removing friction from the process and delighting customers. Automation of internal processes can make employees a lot more productive and businesses more agile.

It is no wonder that interest in chatbots amongst large enterprises is at an all time high Some early movers, like Lyft, are seeing tremendous impact from their chatbot deployments. Lyft’s passenger bot handles over 80% of all customer service requests, including refund requests, without human intervention, saving the company $millions, in addition to speeding up time to resolution for customers from hours to minutes.

At Rulai, we’ve built a next-gen platform, one that is based on our deep AI expertise to be able to handle non-linear conversations, and one that gives the power of AI in the hands of non-technical business users who can design and launch bots with minimal use of precious IT resources.

So, where do we see the market going? We discuss five key trends:

  1. Demise of the dumb bot. Rule-based bots that don’t use AI are on their way to the graveyard.
  2. Chatbots meet Robotic Process Automation. Chatbots can now be used to automate key business processes while providing a natural conversational interface
  3. Successful chatbot deployments will be dependent on having the right people and right design frameworks. Designing a conversational system is very different from designing a website or an app.
  4. Self-improving AI will lead to bots requiring less training data. This will make bots even more useful faster.
  5. Virtual assistants will begin to match the personality of their users. Advanced sentiment analysis will allow bots to adapt in real-time.

Download our 2019 predictions white paper to learn more about the trends that will define the conversational computing space in 2019.

About Rulai:

Rulai is a new Enterprise Conversational Computing Platform provider. Rooted in academia, the founding team has a combined 200 years experience in AI research, published over 400 research papers and filed over 80 patents in AI. Its SaaS platform enables companies to build automated chatbots for customer service, marketing, sales, logistics, and HR use cases and has been deployed across a wide variety of industries. Rulai-based bots help companies automate many human-centric processes to create a fast and frictionless experience for employees and customers. Its self-serve platform allows business users to create and evolve bots with minimal use of precious IT resources. Rulai was recently recognized by GartnerForrester, and Bloomberg. For additional information, visit www.rul.ai

About the author:

Yi Zhang is the CTO and co-founder of Rul.ai. She has been a consultant or technical adviser for several large companies and startups.

Dr. Yi Zhang is also a tenured Professor in School of Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz. She has more than 20 years of experience in AI, with various awards, including ACM SIGIR Best Paper Award, National Science Foundation Faculty Career Award, Google Research Award, Microsoft Research Award, and IBM Research Fellowship. She has served as program chair, area chair and PC member for various top tier international conferences. Dr. Zhang received her Ph.D. and M.S. from School of Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University and her B.S. from Tsinghua University.