The shiny-new-thing phase has passed. Competition for AI excellence is high. Organizations are now clued up to the fact that expertise and experience count when it comes to effective conversational AI solutions. 

A few events the past few weeks have shown or highlighted the fact that the multidisciplinary nature of conversational AI requires depth of expertise. 

Just this week, an MP in the UK launched an AI chatbot of himself. He has been savaged by users, after many people asked various questions that he wasn’t able to answer. There was a disclaimer saying that everything it says should not be taken as fact. What? A politician that makes things up and speaks mistruths? 

Content is the fuel that provides the accurate, honest, and consistent communication that ensures trust in a brand. There will always be things a chatbot or voicebot doesn’t know and being upfront about this is critical. However, there are basic things it should and must. Knowledge is key. Content is king in conversational AI. 

The idea of a virtual MP to answer common enquiries is not flawed, but the execution has been abysmal. It is at the level of conversational AI of 20 years ago. Conversational AI, done correctly by experienced professionals, delivers untold better outcomes than this. 

The need for skills, experience, and expertise in this space, whilst demonstrated above, is also acknowledged by large organizations. 

Last year we saw Microsoft signed a US$650 million deal with Inflection, an AI start up. This brought them use of Inflections’s models and allowed them to hire most of the company’s employees, including its co-founders, one of whom was appointed to run its AI operations. This deal was a lot about the experience and expertise of the people, having as one analyst said, “the cloud giant …has nabbed one of the most coveted teams of AI experts.”

ServiceNow has also sought to bring in expertise through acquisition, recognizing that the space of conversational AI is complex and cannot be bolted on as a DIY project. Earlier this year it announced its intention to acquire AI company Moveworks and is expected to finalize this within the coming months. Their aim is to bring together Moveworks’ AI orchestration platform and ServiceNow’s capabilities to “create a powerful AI agent that can increase productivity and improve customer experience.”

And most recently the announcement that NICE is acquiring Cognigy for around US$955 million, is another demonstration that it is expertise in the field of conversational AI that is required for success. The conversational and agentic AI market is estimated at around US$30 billion and is the future of customer interactions in this increasingly AI-dominated tech world. 

Everybody jumped on the AI bandwagon, and its strategic importance is well recognized. But AI adoption with successful outcomes, rests on ensuring the service provider has the skills, experience, and expertise, coupled with the technology to deliver. 

Without a multidisciplinary team to deliver conversational AI solutions that, in the case of customer service, are moving from helping to become fully-fledged agents with a wide range of capabilities, AI will not deliver on its promises.