Accessibility Statement Skip Navigation
  • Why PRWeb
  • How It Works
  • Who Uses It
  • Pricing
  • Login
  • GDPR
  • Create a Free Account
Return to PRWeb homepage
  • News
  • Resources
  • Contact
When typing in this field, a list of search results will appear and be automatically updated as you type.

Searching for your content...

No results found. Please change your search terms and try again.
  • News in Focus
      • Browse News Releases

      • All News Releases
      • Multimedia Gallery

      • All Multimedia
      • All Photos
      • All Videos
  • Business & Money
      • Auto & Transportation

      • Aerospace, Defense
      • Air Freight
      • Airlines & Aviation
      • Automotive
      • Maritime & Shipbuilding
      • Railroads and Intermodal Transportation
      • Supply Chain/Logistics
      • Transportation, Trucking & Railroad
      • Travel
      • Trucking and Road Transportation
      • View All Auto & Transportation

      • Business Technology

      • Blockchain
      • Broadcast Tech
      • Computer & Electronics
      • Computer Hardware
      • Computer Software
      • Data Analytics
      • Electronic Commerce
      • Electronic Components
      • Electronic Design Automation
      • Financial Technology
      • High Tech Security
      • Internet Technology
      • Nanotechnology
      • Networks
      • Peripherals
      • Semiconductors
      • View All Business Technology

      • Entertain­ment & Media

      • Advertising
      • Art
      • Books
      • Entertainment
      • Film and Motion Picture
      • Magazines
      • Music
      • Publishing & Information Services
      • Radio & Podcast
      • Television
      • View All Entertain­ment & Media

      • Financial Services & Investing

      • Accounting News & Issues
      • Acquisitions, Mergers and Takeovers
      • Banking & Financial Services
      • Bankruptcy
      • Bond & Stock Ratings
      • Conference Call Announcements
      • Contracts
      • Cryptocurrency
      • Dividends
      • Earnings
      • Earnings Forecasts & Projections
      • Financing Agreements
      • Insurance
      • Investments Opinions
      • Joint Ventures
      • Mutual Funds
      • Private Placement
      • Real Estate
      • Restructuring & Recapitalization
      • Sales Reports
      • Shareholder Activism
      • Shareholder Meetings
      • Stock Offering
      • Stock Split
      • Venture Capital
      • View All Financial Services & Investing

      • General Business

      • Awards
      • Commercial Real Estate
      • Corporate Expansion
      • Earnings
      • Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG)
      • Human Resource & Workforce Management
      • Licensing
      • New Products & Services
      • Obituaries
      • Outsourcing Businesses
      • Overseas Real Estate (non-US)
      • Personnel Announcements
      • Real Estate Transactions
      • Residential Real Estate
      • Small Business Services
      • Socially Responsible Investing
      • Surveys, Polls and Research
      • Trade Show News
      • View All General Business

  • Science & Tech
      • Consumer Technology

      • Artificial Intelligence
      • Blockchain
      • Cloud Computing/Internet of Things
      • Computer Electronics
      • Computer Hardware
      • Computer Software
      • Consumer Electronics
      • Cryptocurrency
      • Data Analytics
      • Electronic Commerce
      • Electronic Gaming
      • Financial Technology
      • Mobile Entertainment
      • Multimedia & Internet
      • Peripherals
      • Social Media
      • STEM (Science, Tech, Engineering, Math)
      • Supply Chain/Logistics
      • Wireless Communications
      • View All Consumer Technology

      • Energy & Natural Resources

      • Alternative Energies
      • Chemical
      • Electrical Utilities
      • Gas
      • General Manufacturing
      • Mining
      • Mining & Metals
      • Oil & Energy
      • Oil and Gas Discoveries
      • Utilities
      • Water Utilities
      • View All Energy & Natural Resources

      • Environ­ment

      • Conservation & Recycling
      • Environmental Issues
      • Environmental Policy
      • Environmental Products & Services
      • Green Technology
      • Natural Disasters
      • View All Environ­ment

      • Heavy Industry & Manufacturing

      • Aerospace & Defense
      • Agriculture
      • Chemical
      • Construction & Building
      • General Manufacturing
      • HVAC (Heating, Ventilation and Air-Conditioning)
      • Machinery
      • Machine Tools, Metalworking and Metallurgy
      • Mining
      • Mining & Metals
      • Paper, Forest Products & Containers
      • Precious Metals
      • Textiles
      • Tobacco
      • View All Heavy Industry & Manufacturing

      • Telecomm­unications

      • Carriers and Services
      • Mobile Entertainment
      • Networks
      • Peripherals
      • Telecommunications Equipment
      • Telecommunications Industry
      • VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol)
      • Wireless Communications
      • View All Telecomm­unications

  • Lifestyle & Health
      • Consumer Products & Retail

      • Animals & Pets
      • Beers, Wines and Spirits
      • Beverages
      • Bridal Services
      • Cannabis
      • Cosmetics and Personal Care
      • Fashion
      • Food & Beverages
      • Furniture and Furnishings
      • Home Improvement
      • Household, Consumer & Cosmetics
      • Household Products
      • Jewelry
      • Non-Alcoholic Beverages
      • Office Products
      • Organic Food
      • Product Recalls
      • Restaurants
      • Retail
      • Supermarkets
      • Toys
      • View All Consumer Products & Retail

      • Entertain­ment & Media

      • Advertising
      • Art
      • Books
      • Entertainment
      • Film and Motion Picture
      • Magazines
      • Music
      • Publishing & Information Services
      • Radio & Podcast
      • Television
      • View All Entertain­ment & Media

      • Health

      • Biometrics
      • Biotechnology
      • Clinical Trials & Medical Discoveries
      • Dentistry
      • FDA Approval
      • Fitness/Wellness
      • Health Care & Hospitals
      • Health Insurance
      • Infection Control
      • International Medical Approval
      • Medical Equipment
      • Medical Pharmaceuticals
      • Mental Health
      • Pharmaceuticals
      • Supplementary Medicine
      • View All Health

      • Sports

      • General Sports
      • Outdoors, Camping & Hiking
      • Sporting Events
      • Sports Equipment & Accessories
      • View All Sports

      • Travel

      • Amusement Parks and Tourist Attractions
      • Gambling & Casinos
      • Hotels and Resorts
      • Leisure & Tourism
      • Outdoors, Camping & Hiking
      • Passenger Aviation
      • Travel Industry
      • View All Travel

  • Policy & Public Interest
      • Policy & Public Interest

      • Advocacy Group Opinion
      • Animal Welfare
      • Congressional & Presidential Campaigns
      • Corporate Social Responsibility
      • Domestic Policy
      • Economic News, Trends, Analysis
      • Education
      • Environmental
      • European Government
      • FDA Approval
      • Federal and State Legislation
      • Federal Executive Branch & Agency
      • Foreign Policy & International Affairs
      • Homeland Security
      • Labor & Union
      • Legal Issues
      • Natural Disasters
      • Not For Profit
      • Patent Law
      • Public Safety
      • Trade Policy
      • U.S. State Policy
      • View All Policy & Public Interest

  • People & Culture
      • People & Culture

      • Aboriginal, First Nations & Native American
      • African American
      • Asian American
      • Children
      • Diversity, Equity & Inclusion
      • Hispanic
      • Lesbian, Gay & Bisexual
      • Men's Interest
      • People with Disabilities
      • Religion
      • Senior Citizens
      • Veterans
      • Women
      • View All People & Culture

  • Hamburger menu
  • Cision PRWeb provides efficient communication tools to continuously engage with target audiences across multiple online channels
  • Create a Free Account
    • ALL CONTACT INFO
    • Contact Us


      11AM ET Sunday – 8PM ET Friday

  • Send a Release
  • Sign up
  • Log in
  • Resources
  • RSS
  • GDPR
  • News in Focus
    • Browse All News
    • Multimedia Gallery
  • Business & Money
    • Auto & Transportation
    • Business Technology
    • Entertain­ment & Media
    • Financial Services & Investing
    • General Business
  • Science & Tech
    • Consumer Technology
    • Energy & Natural Resources
    • Environ­ment
    • Heavy Industry & Manufacturing
    • Telecomm­unications
  • Lifestyle & Health
    • Consumer Products & Retail
    • Entertain­ment & Media
    • Health
    • Sports
    • Travel
  • Policy & Public Interest
  • People & Culture
    • People & Culture
  • Send a Release
  • Sign up
  • Log in
  • Resources
  • RSS
  • GDPR
  • Send a Release
  • Sign up
  • Log in
  • Resources
  • RSS
  • GDPR
  • Send a Release
  • Sign up
  • Log in
  • Resources
  • RSS
  • GDPR

Why Chatbots Often Aren’t Smart Enough
  • USA - English


News provided by

Earley Information Science

Jan 30, 2017, 03:00 ET

Share this article

Share toX

Share this article

Share toX

Earley Executive Roundtable Delivers Valuable Insights on Digital Transformation
Earley Executive Roundtable Delivers Valuable Insights on Digital Transformation

Carlisle, MA (PRWEB) January 30, 2017 -- Companies of all kinds are deploying armies of chatbots and other virtual assistants to provide support for existing customers and to attract new ones. But even as the software that powers these assistants gets more and more sophisticated, the customer’s experience will not improve and will in fact suffer if the information needed for the “chats” remains incomplete, inappropriate or not readily accessible.

if a task proves to be too complex, hand it off to a human – with the bot serving as a partner by providing support where it can

Post this

In short, the touted potential of artificial intelligence (AI) will be compromised if care isn’t taken to do the preliminary work of organizing the information properly, according to a panel of knowledge management experts who participated in an Executive Roundtable discussion hosted on Jan. 18 by Earley Information Science Corp. (EIS), a leading consulting firm focused on digital transformation. Otherwise, the interactions will be just the latest example of “garbage in, garbage out,” the experts agreed, suggesting approaches and processes to avoid that outcome.

“Chatbots are a channel, whether they take the form of an avatar or a chat interface, and their function is to serve as an access point to information,” said one of the experts, Seth Earley, Chief Executive Officer and founder of EIS. To function successfully, he said, “chatbots have to sit on top of a repository of content that is specifically structured to support the tasks in question.” And they also need retrieval mechanisms that will allow them to quickly find and serve up the relevant slices of that content, he added.

The discussion, “Virtual Assistants & Chatbots: The Next Big Thing in Customer Experience,” was led by David Hatch, Senior Vice President for marketing at EIS. Besides Mr. Earley, the panel included Dan Miller, Lead Analyst and Founder of Opus Research; Henry Truong, Chief Technology Officer at TeleTech Holdings; and Sumeet Vij, Chief Technologist specializing in data science and AI at Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting firm.

Another issue, Earley noted, is to recognize that AI, despite all that it can do, is still in its relative infancy, and a company has to be careful not to ask it to perform beyond its current abilities. Train chatbots to handle simpler tasks and processes, he cautioned, those that are repeatable, structured and unambiguous. Monitor call centers and study the transcripts of “live” agents to identify those simpler tasks and processes. And if a task proves to be too complex, hand it off to a human – with the bot serving as a partner by providing support where it can.

Opus Research’s Dan Miller described the broad spectrum of roles and tasks that intelligent assistants now handle – from making homes and cars “conversational” and acting as virtual travel, wellness or financial advisors to support, sales and scheduling for enterprise customers and employees.

TeleTech’s Henry Truong discussed new approaches to building smarter solutions for customer care. Capitalizing on advances in “automation maturity,” these approaches produce more business value as they move from information-based learning to probability-based learning and eventually cognitive learning.

The strategic goal, Truong said, is to develop partnerships in which digital workers simplify the tasks, allowing human workers to engage with customers in deeper ways.

Such partnerships are acutely needed in the government sector, said Booz Allen’s Sumeet Vij, who described the growing service shortfall at such resource-strained agencies of the federal government as the Internal Revenue Service. Deployed well, chatbots would help these agencies “leap frog” their way to much better levels of service.

One dividend, Vij said, is to use the bots to capture institutional knowledge, enabling future employees to learn from the “collective intelligence” of past and current employees.

The roundtable featured a real-time survey of the webinar attendees, including these results:
• A quarter of the respondents said that chatbots are a major priority of their business, having won funding and executive buy-in. But nearly half, or 47%, said that bots, while important, still require a business case. And more than a quarter (28%) said that they are not a priority.
• More than half, or 51%, said that they are just starting to investigate the use of virtual assistants at their companies, with another 20% in an early stage of internal testing.
• As for the areas in which chatbots are being employed, with respondents allowed to pick more than one area, the top three answers were customer/member service (43%), technical support (19%) and the selling process (14%). “Nowhere yet” was chosen by 40%.

Please use this link to access the roundtable. To learn more about practical applications of virtual assistants and AI, see this list of suggested resources.

About Earley Information Science: EIS helps organizations establish a strong information architecture and management foundation to drive strategic business outcomes and enhance operational performance. EIS has more than 20 years of experience in working with Fortune 1000 organizations globally across many industries. Corporate headquarters are in the Boston metropolitan area with consultants working on projects around the world. For more about Earley Information Science, visit our website at http://www.earley.com or contact us at info(at)earley(dot)com.

Sharon Foley, Earley Information Science, http://www.earley.com, +1 423-797-1575, [email protected]

Modal title

Contact PRWeb

  • 11AM ET Sunday – 8PM ET Friday
  • Contact Us

About PRWeb

  • About PRWeb
  • Partners
  • Partnership Programs
  • Editorial Guidelines
  • Resources

Why PRWeb

  • Why PRWeb
  • How It Works
  • Who Uses It
  • Pricing

Accounts

  • Create a Free Account
  • Log in
  • Contact Us

Do not sell or share my personal information:

  • Submit via [email protected] 
  • Call Privacy toll-free: 877-297-8921

Contact Cision

Products

About

My Services
  • All News Releases
  • Online Member Center
  • ProfNet
Cision Distribution Helpline
888-776-0942
  • Legal
  • Site Map
  • RSS
  • Cookie Settings
Copyright © 2025 Cision US Inc.