| Good morning, Marketer, are you getting chatty? With more and more customers “up for grabs,” as yesterday’s Daily Brief put it, are you relying on chat technology to engage them and retain their attention? And if you’re doing it at scale, are you using chatbots? Chatbots have been with us for a while now but a lot of them still seem stuck in the primitive mode of referring you to a live agent if they’re automated dropdown list of replies doesn’t answer your question. The chatbot described in our story about STCHealth does indeed push customers through a guided workflow (or a dropdown list of replies as I like to call it). But powered by AI, it can at least refine the workflows as it gathers data. Despite advances in natural language generation, it might be quite some time before we are dealing with a chatbot that’s indistinguishable from a human agent, because that’s a chatbot that would pass the Turing test, described over 70 years ago, and not yet truly passed. Kim Davis
Editorial Director | 