chatbots Archives — Carrington Malin

June 20, 2025

The biggest barrier for AI First channels to overcome is a human one: trust. People are now, for the most part, willing to accept that AI can be useful, but there are plenty of things that they won’t trust it with. This is not because they are not comfortable with accepting the perceived risks of AI, but in commercial use, conversational AI has clearly failed to meet expectations.

At least two-thirds of consumers would prefer to seek human assistance over any automated service.

New research from ServiceNow sums the situation up quite nicely. A survey of 1,000 UAE residents found that 76% of consumers recognise the importance of a good chatbot service. However, respondents were also asked to rank their first choice of support channel according to their mood (for example calm and focused, or impatient and frustrated etc.). At least two-thirds of consumers – across all types of moods – would prefer to seek human assistance over any automated service.

This is an issue of trust. In the same survey, people were asked what they would trust an AI chatbot with. The most popular answer was ‘Tracking a lost or delayed package’, but with only 24% of respondents admitting that this is something they would trust a chatbot to do.

Unrealistic expectations?

Conversational AI clearly has a long way to go before consumers will trust company chatbots or voicebots, but this doubt remains in the face of enormous optimism and positivity towards AI in general in the UAE. The sentiment towards conversational AI in customer service provides a stark contrast to the attitudes of consumers towards the use of AI in daily life and their use of virtual assistants.

Another new survey on attitudes towards AI, this time from Melbourne Business School and KPMG, found that 86% of UAE respondents accept or approve of AI, with 65% confirming that they are willing to trust AI. So, it would seem that business has a problem. Even in a country as overwhelmingly optimistic about the benefits of AI, with rising levels of trust in the technology, businesses are still struggling to build that trust in their own conversational AI channels.

58% of respondents already expect that company chatbots should be able to respond differently according to their mood.- ServiceNow

It would also seem that the near ubiquitous use of ChatGPT and other virtual assistants is proving to be a mixed blessing for AI’s use in customer experience. OpenAI‘s ChatGPT, Google Gemini, X‘s Grok and others have been instrumental in raising expectations for how commercial conversational AI channels should behave and how they should respond to consumers: some would say to unrealistic levels! In ServiceNow’s UAE survey, 58% of respondents already expect that company chatbots should be able to respond differently according to their mood.

GenAI is becoming indispensable

On the plus side, the UAE’s enthusiasm for GenAI has meant that consumers are becoming a lot more comfortable communicating with AI in general, and many are adopting virtual assistants as their go-to channel for a variety of tasks from Internet research, to writing emails and generating business documents, to comparison shopping.

In fact, this month’s UAE Retail Report 2025 from global payment platform Adyen informs that 70% of UAE consumers have used ChatGPT or similar AI assistants to help them with shopping (more than double the 34% average across EMEA). The report also notes that the use of AI assistants for shopping by UAE consumers has surged 44% since 2024.

This means that are growing numbers of people using conversational AI on a daily basis. The KPMG report found that 92% of office workers in the UAE intentionally use AI at work, while 54% felt that they couldn’t complete their work without using AI! This usage also takes place in the knowledge that there are risks that come from using AI. Of those surveyed, 75% were concerned about negative outcomes from AI and 64% admitted that they made mistakes in their work as a result of using AI.

A question of value

Therefore, it would appear that even with the knowledge that using AI comes with certain risks, most consumers are still comfortable in using virtual assistants to help them, and are using them for more and more different tasks. Why? Well, why does anyone take to using anything that has attendant risks? Because consumers believe that the perceived value outweighs the perceived risks. I would argue strongly that consumers tend to avoid company chatbots when they can because they don’t believe that the perceived value outweighs the perceived risks.

When ServiceNow asked survey participants what the top barriers were for consumers in using AI chatbots for customer service, 93% agreed there were barriers. Although, when asked what their top barrier was, no one reason accrued more than a 14% vote (which was ‘They struggle with complex tasks”). So it looks very like the main barrier could simply be not meeting increasingly high consumer expectations. 47% of UAE respondents confirmed this, agreeing that the effectiveness of AI chatbots had not met their expectations.

In the same survey 34% said that the effectiveness of AI chatbots had met their expectations, and encouragingly 19% said that effectiveness had exceeded their expectations. The fact remains though, that if almost half of your customers believe that you have failed to meet expectations, you have do have problems!

If almost 50% of your customers believe that you have failed to meet expectations, you have do have problems!

Rising consumer expectations are a fact of life for big brands, service providers, retailers, public authorities and many other kinds of organisation that must provide a positive customer experience. However, the comparison between free-to-use GenAI assistants and commercial chatbots and voicebots is hardly a fair one, but it’s one that is impossible to erase from the minds of consumers. The consequences of ChatGPT failing to meet expectations once and a while, are almost zero, but in a commercial environment, failing to handle a customer enquiry appropriately can end the relationship and so have a financial cost.

Raising the bar

It is clear then, company chatbots shouldn’t try to become general purpose tools like ChatGPT, because the risks are too great. It is also clear that the value proposition for most company chatbots is not clear and a common perception is that they are the poor, awkward, error-prone relation of human-to-human customer service. Despite using one of the most advanced customer service channels ever deployed in commerce, the majority of conversational AI simply has no ‘wow ‘!

The failure of chatbots and voicebots to meet consumer expectations is not a UAE, or a regional, problem. Organisations worldwide are faced with similar challenges. However, organisations in the UAE may have distinct advantages over counterparts in other geos, in particular Europe and north America. In a new global YouGov survey, the Emirates is markedly more positive about AI than Western countries and getting more so. The UAE’s optimism and acceptance towards Ai arguably make it the ideal testing ground to innovate, iterate and develop conversational AI services that raise the bar.

The tech giant’s new chatbot could make AI-powered communication more conversational and even more profitable

Since the launch of Apple’s Siri a decade ago, more than 1.5 billion virtual assistants have been installed on smartphones and other devices. There can be few electronics users who don’t recognise the enormous promise of conversational AI. However, our seemingly hard of hearing virtual assistants and awkward artificial intelligence chatbot conversations have also proven the technology’s limitations.

Anyone who uses AI assistants is sure to experience frequent misunderstandings, irrelevant answers and way too many ‘I don’t know’ responses, while many corporate chatbots simply serve up pre-defined bits of information whether you ask for them to or not. So, while we have seen massive advances in natural language processing (NLP) during recent years, human-to-AI conversations remain far from ‘natural’.

But that may soon change.

Last week, a team from Google published an academic paper on ‘Meena’, an open-domain chatbot developed on top of a huge neural network and trained on about 40 billion words of real social media conversations. The result, Google says, is that Meena can chat with you about just about anything and hold a better conversation than any other AI agent created to-date.

One of the things that Google’s development team has been working on is how to increase the chatbot’s ability to hold multi-turn conversations, where a user’s follow-up questions are considered by AI in context of the whole conversations so far. The team’s solution has been to build the chatbot on a neural network, a set of algorithms modeled loosely on the way the human brain works, which is designed to recognise patterns in data. This neural network was then trained on large volumes of data to create 2.6 billion parameters, which inform those algorithms and so improve Meena’s conversation quality.

Creating conversational computer applications that can pass for human intelligence has been a core theme for both computer science and science fiction since the fifties. Alan Turing, the famous British World War II codebreaker and one of the founding fathers of AI theory, developed a test to measure if a computer system can exhibit intelligent behaviour indistinguishable from that of a human in 1950. Since then, the Turing Test has been somewhat of a Holy Grail for computer scientists and technology developers.

However, Google’s quest to develop a superior chatbot is far from academic. The global AI chatbot market offers one of the best examples for how AI can drive revenue for businesses. Business and government organisations worldwide are investing in chatbots, in an effort to enhance customer service levels, decrease costs and open up new revenue opportunities. According to research company Markets and Markets, the global market for conversational AI solutions is forecast to grow from $4.2 billion (Dh15.4bn) in 2019 to $15.7bn by the year 2024.

Chatbot solutions built for large enterprises have the ability to carry on tens of thousands of conversations simultaneously, drawing on millions of data points. Global advisory firm Gartner Group has found AI chatbots used for customer service can lead to reductions in customer calls, email and other enquiries by up to 70 per cent.

All this industry growth and customer service success is taking place despite the innumerable issues that users encounter when trying to have customer service conversations with AI chatbots. As consumers, we are now conditioned to dealing with technology that doesn’t quite work. If the benefits outweigh the frustration, we’re happy to work around the problem. We rephrase our questions when a chatbot can’t interpret our request or choose from the options offered, rather than try to solicit further information. Or, if we feel the conversation is just too much effort for the reward, we just give up.

The latent opportunity for virtual customer assistants is that they could play an active role in defining needs and preferences in the moment, whilst in conversation with the customer, helping to create highly personalised services. Today, programmers have to limit the options that customer service chatbots offer or too many conversations result in dead-ends, unmet requests and frustrated customers. So, choices offered to customers by chatbots, are often as simple as A, B or C.

If developers can increase a chatbot’s ability to hold a more natural human conversation, then chatbots may have the opportunity to solicit more actionable data from customer conversations, resolve a wider range of customer issues automatically and identify additional revenue opportunities in an instant.

Given how fast the chatbot technology market is growing, the payback from enabling AI chatbots to bring customer conversations to a more profitable conclusion could register in the billions of dollars.

This story was first published in The National.

September 25, 2019

Despite the proclamations of enhanced customer experience, much of the interest and deployment of chatbots today is driven by cost savings. Customer service departments and the CFOs that approve their budgets have an opportunity to significantly reduce HR costs and add a new service that also has the prospect of being a revenue generator.

However, there are good reasons why large companies replacing human customer service with an automated customer service agent should consider chatbot projects as brand and customer experience initiatives first, and not simply a software roll-out.

Continue reading this story on Linkedin.

September 10, 2019

More than half of employers don’t have a written policy on the ethical use of AI or bots, whilst AI chatbots and how they interact with customers play a growing role in shaping brand perceptions.

If you’ve implemented a new AI chatbot platform, then your brand’s chatbot can be made available to customers 24/7, respond instantly to queries and resolve up to 80 percent of questions without the need to involve a human customer service agent. However, customer service agents are generally bound by contracts, employee codes of conduct and operating procedures. Do the same rules apply for your chatbot?

Continue reading this story on Linkedin

August 29, 2019

Many companies have discussions about their brand’s personality, whether brought on by a brand development exercise, or the question of how their brand comes across in TV advertising or, perhaps, how it is seen and heard on social media. Is the brand playful or serious? Traditional or nonconformist? Conservative or outrageous? Does it have a sense of humour?

Often these personality attributes remain somewhat latent. Companies that see their brands as risk takers or eccentric, often find that they don’t particularly want to broadcast the fact for fear of upsetting their conservative customers. Likewise, marketers who feel that their brands can have a little bit of fun on social media, because it is expected of them by other social media users, often don’t use the same sort of fun persona for other communications.

So, where does this all leave us when it comes to conversational marketing?

Continue reading this story on Linkedin

chatbots Archives — Carrington Malin

The state of conversational AI in the UAE

Unrealistic expectations?

GenAI is becoming indispensable

A question of value

Raising the bar

LINKS

What Google’s more human-like chatbot will do

The tech giant’s new chatbot could make AI-powered communication more conversational and even more profitable

5 reasons your chatbot should be considered a brand ambassador

Chatbots just do what they’re told, don’t they?

Should your brand’s chatbot have a sense of humour?

The state of conversational AI in the UAE

Changes to US export controls on AI chips

Will AI reduce our working hours?

The state of conversational AI in the UAE

Changes to US export controls on AI chips

Will AI reduce our working hours?