Startups Want Chatbots, but 80% Lack the Knowledge about Conversational AI

DeepPavlov.ai, the team behind an open source Conversational AI stack designed to enable faster and easier chatbots and AI-assistants development, surveyed conversational AI usage by startups. The survey says that 100% of startups think that chatbot’s integration is one of the most efficient ways to make their business more seamless. At the same time, the majority (almost 80%) mention that they are struggling with the development of chatbots and they are not well aware of how to implement chatbots, the survey says.

Twenty startup founders and CTOs from edu-tech, fintech, automation, and consulting markets participated in the research. All of them mentioned the undeniable benefits of chatbots for their niches. Among the results they expect from the chatbot development is an increased containment rate of customer contacts, increased call center human agents’ efficiency, and an opportunity to cut operational costs thanks to the automation of the clients’ communications.

“We aim to automate sales processes at a maximum level and optimize the sales managers’ work”, – one of the respondents from consulting says.

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“We need an AI assistant that will help us to accompany the educational process, including tasks management and revising self-educational strategy right in the process”, – comments a respondent from the edu-tech market.

The survey’s results correlate with the global research studies. Gartner says that small businesses can save money on salaries and training by replacing people with chatbots. Key results from the investment in chatbots include being able to increase the containment of customer contacts via a virtual assistant, increasing the efficiency of their sales managers, improving customer experience, and providing additional business opportunities.

However, startup founders struggle with naming the specific functions required from chatbots, in particular statement NLP classifiers (even mentioning this while answering the questions). 50% said that they would benefit from extracting intentions and capabilities (e.g., sarcasm) within the dialogues with clients. The opportunity to extract named entities was mentioned by 45%. 10% say they require a definition of sentiment capabilities.

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The key survey result is that the majority (80% of respondents) do not understand the possibilities of cutting-edge conversational AI and chatbots for their businesses. Thus, the need to educate startups about Conversational AI and make it easier to use comes into play.

“With chatbots, organizations can replace simple human interactions, respond instantly, allow customers contact with business anytime, at day and night, or even complete more complicated tasks, e.g. associated with different modalities, channels, languages. However, our survey shows a great lack of knowledge we have to fill in. At DeepPavlov, an academia-born Conversational AI project, we are a bit far from commercial chatbots` use, however, one of our key focuses lies in knowledge transfer and unleashing the advantages of AI assistants for target audiences, including small and medium-sized businesses. We created dozens of webinars, articles and other materials about chatbots development, so those who lack the information could use it and benefit from building AI assistants in a faster and easier way. We are also developing a user-friendly web platform for building multiskill AI assistants using our open source Conversational AI stack, and with it its customers will finally unlock the grand potential of the cutting edge Conversational AI”, – Daniel Kornev, CPO of DeepPavlov.ai.

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